Slashdot Mirror
Computer Reveals Stone Tablet "Handwriting"
ewenc writes "A computer technique can tell the difference between ancient Greek inscriptions created by different artisans, a feat that ordinarily consumes years of human scholarship, reports New Scientist. A team of Greek computer scientists created the program after a scholar challenged them to attribute 24 inscriptions to their rightful cutter. The researchers scanned the tablets and constructed an average shape for several Greek letters in every tablet. After comparing the average letters between different tablets, they correctly attributed the inscriptions to six stone-cutters."
3-D would be an obvious add-on here - the depth of the cut stone incision should reveal a lot
about the force being used, and I would expect that to be a distinguishing characteristic.
As someone who majored in Classics as an undergraduate (before moving on to linguistics), I've gotten a lot of flack in technology nerd circles like Slashdot for spending time in such a field. Nowadays the value of study of the ancient world is seen as offering limited benefits, and the popular image of a classicist is of a bookish loser all alone in his musty, unvisited department. I think that's a pity especially because Classics is a field very ready to use new technology to help us better understand the past. The Oxyrynchus papyri, for example, a bunch of old papers found in an Egyptian garbage dump, have been scanned with state of the art cameras which have revealed whole new texts, including lost works by some of the great classic authors.
So spending time with old inscriptions can still seem a worthy task to the Slashdot crowd. Beyond just using whizbang new technology, the decipherment of the Rosetta Stone for example (see e.g. Parkinson's Cracking Codes ) ought to fascinate the more mathematically oriented of us.
It sounds like this medium is considerably longer lived than paper tape, 9-track reels, CDs, DVDs, or anything else I can think of storing important data on. Now all I need is a high density tablet drive.
Now we can figure out which one of them wrote that nasty message on the bathroom stall door! Finally, justice will be done!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Time to break out the Stone of Triumph!
If we can just get them to all register a stone carving sample,
we can expand the database and credit those responsible.
WTF? Over?
I bet the software application was a neural net.
Yours In Parallel,
Kilgore Trout
Seems to me that it is impossible to verify that the machine analysis is correct, only that it matches the analysis done by a trained human. Proving correct attribution would require either a signature on each piece or the testimony of the original artisans.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A scholar suggested to me that we should use computer-assisted greek inscriptions recognition (CAGIR) as an evaluation. I was skeptical at first but he explained the benefits of using it for our employee's day-to-day research. So I decided to let him install the CAGIR (made by Hellas software I think) into 5 offices to see how the users got on. Besides, our translation manager had been using CAGIR in his office and it seemed to work fine, why not try it on the research offices? Once he'd got the machines up and running with CAGIR software we let the users try it out. It all seemed fine to start with: CAGIR was a pretty good replacement for regular service and the users could still do their work as normal.
Alas it did not stay that way. After a few days, I had lost count of the number of complaints received from users who could not find things they were used to (like alpa and omega!) or tasks they could not perform that they previously could with the greek inscription dictionary they used before. The final straw came when one researcher lost several hours work when the CAGIR software suddenly had an error reading from an ancient trojan tablet, and exchanged it for a modern greek inscription. Needless to say, the Hellas support team offered no support whatsoever. I made the employee remove CAGIR from the offices and lets just say he's not with us anymore.
A computer can do something in a fraction of the time it would take a human!
"The Y chromosome is genetic. The odds are very good that if you are male then your father was too." -Internet Commenter
Q: Why does it take years for people to decode those scripts?
A: Because it is all greek to us.
Thank you, thank you. No autographs please.
They have identified their first inscription....
ALL YOUR VASE ARE BELONG TO US
Upon Decoding the Tablets they found out one of the tablets said "The Game".
You need the old inscription read? Big deal. Give it here.
... ah ... verada, ... ah ... necktie!
You just gotta say the words, dood. Piece of cake.
Klaatu, verada,
No, nickel!
Nectar!!
damn
From the description of the test, I take it that all known tablets were scanned. The programmers then showed they could categorize those tablets. How well does their program work on unknowns that are not part of their database? A blind test is needed to show that tablets of those sculptors that are not part of ground truth can also be correctly categorized.
35+ Years ago, Professor Nabil Farhatpresented what might be called "Handwriting Attribution by 3 Year Olds." He showed an audience 3 different handwritten cursive script documents, let's call them A, B, and C. The texts of the three documents had nothing to do with each other. The authorship of documents A and C was uncontested. The authorship of B was highly contested. He then showed the 2D Fourier transforms of the documents. To any observer, even a three year old, two of the image transforms (A&B) were obviously similar, while one (C) was very different. A was written by Esterhazy, while C was written by Dreyfus. B was the controversial letter behind the Dreyfus Affair.
See also:
Writer identification based on handwriting
Wouldnt that be chisel writing?
In other news, they just decoded thousand years old hieroglyphics... it said, "Jefferson, if you're reading this, you're spending way too long decoding hieroglyphics in way that was not at all intended ;)"
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that