DeepMind AI Beats Humans At Deciphering Damaged Ancient Greek Tablets - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Yannis Assael at DeepMind and his colleagues trained a neural network, a type of AI algorithm, to guess missing words or characters from Greek inscriptions, on surfaces including stone, ceramic and metal, that were between 1500 and 2600 years old. The AI, called Pythia, learned to recognize patterns in 35,000 relics, containing more than 3 million words. The patterns it picks up on include the context in which different words appear, the grammar, and also the shape and layout of the inscriptions. Given an inscription with missing information, Pythia provides 20 different suggestions that could plug the gap, with the idea that someone could then select the best one using their own judgement and subject knowledge. "It's all about how we can help the experts," says Assael.