via The Conversation, 10 June 2024: The Singapore Stone is being studied by researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University using AI technology. The stone’s unique writing system has puzzled experts for centuries, but new efforts with an AI program, Read-y Grammarian, aim to decode the lost language and reveal its historical secrets.
My colleagues and I are developing Read-y Grammarian, an artificial intelligence program that can “learn” the surviving characters of the epigraph and guess and elaborate on the missing parts of its text. Unlike humans, the program doesn’t have interpretive biases (cognitive bias informed by a researcher’s beliefs). Mitigating these biases is a fundamental requirement for research in language deciphering.
If we can recover a reliable text for the slab, more material will be available for comparison, frequency analysis and pattern recognition – the first steps towards decipherment and hearing the voice of the stone for the first time.
