A.I. Is Helping Archaeologists Translate Ancient Tablets Digital Trends

Deep-learning artificial intelligence is helping grapple with plenty of problems in the modern world. But it also has its part to play in helping solve some ancient problems as well -- such as assisting in the translation of 2,500-year-old clay tablet documents from Persia's Achaemenid Empire. These tablets, which were discovered in modern-day Iran in 1933, have been studied by scholars for decades. However, they've found the translation process for the tablets -- which number in the tens of thousands -- to be laborious and prone to errors. "We have initial experiments applying machine learning to identify which cuneiform symbols are present in images of a tablet," Sanjay Krishnan, assistant professor at the University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science, told Digital Trends.