Slashdot Mirror
Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Ancient Jewish Lore
First time accepted submitter aravenwood writes "The New York Times and the Times of Israel report today that artificial intelligence and a network of 100 computers in a basement in Tel Aviv University are being used to match 320,000 fragments of documents dating as far back as the 9th century in an attempt to reassemble the original documents. Since the trove of documents from the Jewish community of Cairo was discovered in 1896 only about 4000 of them have been pieced together, and the hope is that the new technique, which involves taking photographs of the fragments and using image recognition and other algorithms to match the language, spacing, and handwriting style of the text along with the shape of the fragment to other fragments could revolutionize not only the study of this trove documents, which has been split up into 67 different collections around the world since its discovery, but also how humanities disciplines study documents like these. They expect to make 12 billion comparisons of different fragments before the project is completed — they have already performed 2.8 billion. Among the documents, some dating from 950, was the discovery of letters by Moses Maimonides and that Cairene Jews were involved in the import of flax, linen, and sheep cheese from Sicily."
According to Wikipedia, Maimonides lived Passover Eve, 1135 to December 12, 1204; how was he able to write a document in 950?
The summary states "Among the documents, some dating from 950 ...". It is pretty clear that the "950" refers to the earliest known date of any of the documents, not the date of all of them.
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that the earliest documents were related to Maimonides, just that there were very early manuscripts and also his documents were also discovered there. When I was at the British Museum they had a letter of Maimonides prominently displayed. I wonder if it was acquired from the Cairo Genizah trove.
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
People made stuff up and years later, hundreds of millions of people thought it was real ...
Some of the documents are religious texts, but many others are bills, receipts, inventory lists, and even personal letters. These mundane documents often shed a lot of illumination on how ordinary people lived their lives. Archeologists often learn far more from looking at a civilization's garbage dumps, than from their treasures.
Case in point: The name that God used for himself when dealing with humanity in the 2500s-500s BCE was "Yahweh", meaning roughly "he who causes being". It appears nearly 7,000 times in the Hebrew Scriptures, and not one of those uses caused the universe's destruction. (In English, God's name is often rendered "Jehovah", just as the name of his only son "Yeshua" became "Jesus" after passing through Greek, Latin, and French.)
Should all of mankind's endeavors grind to a halt until the world is in a state of perfect harmony and prosperity?
Humans, in our great numbers, are capable of multi-tasking. Is every penny not spent on helping the helpless a selfish waste?
An infinite amount of money cannot solve all of the world's problems in a day, and there are more problems everyday. More often it is not a question of money but of resources, money is only a means to trade for such finite resources. With finite resources like time, energy, innovation, and persuasion, every do-gooder has to pick their battles.
To answer half your question, because this works scales nicely in that the work is parallel. It can be broken down and run on multiple computers, cores, threads, VM, clould, whatever. So that explains the number. And a computer that is a 100 times faster then a normal computer tends to be over a 100 times more expensive.
As why not to the cloud? I am going to take a wild guess that it's the data – there is a lot of it so access could be a bottle neck. In this case you want your data and cpus to be physical close to each other. I am sure something could be rigged up in the cloud, but that might be more expensive, but now I entered the realm of serious speculation.
They should have used 40 computers. Its a biblical number, which would make the resulting prophecies more believable.
Meanwhile, work is underway to recover old Slashdot posts on a 666 node cluster.
Have gnu, will travel.
Are any shopping lists? Can of kraut? Tuna? Bring home for Emma?
I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be a bagel somewhere in there.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not all Christians interpret the Bible to teach a "trinity". Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, interpret John 1 to mean that in the beginning, God (i.e. YHWH) created the Word (i.e. Michael), created all other things through the Word, and later the Word became flesh (i.e. Jesus). Thus Jesus and YHWH "are one" (John 10:30) in the same sense that Jesus and the congregation are one (John 17:21-23).
The mods missed the obvious Arthur C Clarke reference. Pretty sad for a Nerd News site.
This is one of those times where I'm glad I RTFA. I assumed it was a bunch of useless Torah fragments, but it actually looks like an interesting project instead. Rather like how excavating a trash midden will reveal more about life during a time period than restoration of a castle would, this promises to reveal more about trade and economics of the time than most of the (extremely biased) historical documents of the period.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Perhaps it's a fear of the end of the world that leads to such superstitions such as not saying god's name, or in Harry potter stories the continual references to "He who shall not be named" for [spoiler alert!!!] Voldemort (vol-de-mort? flight of death? orgasm? wtf???]
The summary from wikipedia:
This short story tells of a Tibetan lamasery whose monks seek to list all of the Names of God, since they believe the Universe was created in order to note all the names of God and once this naming is completed, God will bring the Universe to an end. Three centuries ago, the monks created an alphabet in which they calculated they could encode all the possible names of God, numbering about 9,000,000,000 ("nine billion") and each having no more than nine characters. Writing the names out by hand, as they had been doing, even after eliminating various nonsense combinations, would take another 15,000 years; the monks wish to use modern technology in order to finish this task more quickly..
They rent a computer capable of printing all the possible permutations, and they hire two Westerners to install and program the machine. The computer operators are skeptical but play along. After three months, as the job nears completion, they fear that the monks will blame the computer, and by extension its operators, when nothing happens. The Westerners delay the operation of the computer so that it will complete its final print run just after their scheduled departure. After their successful departure on ponies, they pause on the mountain path on their way back to the airfield, where a plane is waiting to take them back to civilization. Under a clear night sky they estimate that it must be just about the time that the monks are pasting the final printed names into their holy books. Then they notice that ''overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.''
yea but fortunately there are only a few thousand of those, vs hundreds of millions of the other
its howard you dipshit, says so in the loards prayer
it is their fault, for some, the notion that childeren can not go out and do something productive until they hit the arbitrary made up age of adulthood is compete tripe
hey billy, you live in a hut made from garbage, your hungry, what are you going to do... sit on your ass begging for handouts like your parents? fine, why should I feel sorry for you?