Deciphering Ancient Greek inscriptions using AI "Pythia"

Epigraphy, the study of written matter recorded on hard or durable material, which -as a term- is derived from the Classical Greek epigraphein ("to write upon, incise") and epigraphē ("inscription"), is a prime tool in recovering much of the firsthand record of antiquity and thus, an essential adjunct of the study of ancient peoples. However, inscriptions –as records of ancient cultural heritage- are often incomplete due to deliberate destruction, or erosion and fragmentation over the centuries. Illegible parts of the text must then be restored by specialists, known as epigraphists. However one of the problems with discerning meaning from incomplete fragments of text is that there are often multiple possible solutions. Now, researchers at Oxford University - a Greek, Yannis Assael, among them- and Google's DeepMind -a London-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) company- have created Pythia. Bringing together the disciplines of ancient history and deep learning, AI Pythia -which takes its name from the woman who delivered the god Apollo's oracular responses at the Greek sanctuary of Delphi- is the first ancient text restoration model aiming to recover missing characters from a damaged text input using deep neural networks.