Today, there are many inscriptions waiting to be found under the ground covered with soil, stones and concrete buildings. Although some of the inscriptions found are legible, most of them are too worn out to be read.
While these inscriptions sometimes give us interesting information from the past, they sometimes contain sad information. It is a very interesting subject what the people living in the past wanted to tell in the writings they carved on stones, marbles and wood, and what could happen. The past is just as interesting as the future and is full of interesting information. A new artificial intelligence has been developed to decipher the inscriptions that are unreadable.
Damaged inscriptions can be decrypted with the help of artificial intelligence
The artificial intelligence developed by Google Deepmind has been organized to help read damaged inscriptions from Greece. Called Ithaca, the system was built on an ancient system of text restoration known as Pythia. The study, carried out in collaboration with scientists, will be able to illuminate the dark traces of the past that cannot be illuminated. Moreover, Ithaca’s ingenuity is not limited to restoring the texts in the inscriptions; AI can also calculate where the inscription came from and the date of its creation. This will greatly facilitate the work of historians and synagogues.
Studies on many texts written on papyri, stones, metals and pottery that cannot be read due to damage are carried out with great care to avoid further damage. For this reason, radiocarbon cannot be used in studies on texts. In other words, working on these texts requires more effort, more attention and care. If using Ithaca; these studies will now yield much easier and more successful results.
Pythica, which was built on Ithaca, could solve hours of work in seconds
As we have just mentioned, Ithaca was built on the Pythia system produced for a similar purpose. Pythia, on the other hand, had many successful works before. When Pythia encountered an incomplete inscription, she was able to calculate many possibilities to fill in the blanks and present the most probable to historians.
Although it had a 30.1 percent error rate, the studies that took hours of students working in the same field at Oxford University could be solved in seconds. The students and Pythia’s work to decipher the 50 inscriptions took only seconds of Pythia, while the students spent hours deciphering these codes. Now, it is considered that Ithaca, which is developed on this order, will produce much more successful works than Pythia.
The number of successful works that Ithaca has signed is not much for now. However, tests revealed that Ithaca has 62 percent accuracy on damaged inscriptions, while historians have 25 percent accuracy in their work. While Ithaca continues this success in finding the place where the inscriptions came from, it can tell us where the inscription came from with 71 percent accuracy.
Ithaca is a bit busy right now because it’s also backing historians for a series of Athenian decrees. Historians, in their studies, determined the date of the emergence of the Athenian decree as 446 BC, but this caused controversy in many respects. While many historians say that these decrees were mentioned in official documents on and after that date and that the date should have been earlier; The result that Ithaca found was the year 421 BC, as historians had predicted. While many historians say that it is highly likely that the decree was written on this date, Ithaca achieved its first success. It is certain that we will hear the name of Ithaca more often in the coming days and it will help us more in illuminating the traces of our past.
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