| ▲ | Kosturdistan 3 hours ago |
| A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and I wrote the post at the link. |
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| ▲ | kubb 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Let's wait until it's been verified. |
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| ▲ | mikestorrent 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You're absolutely right! We've opened a ticket with the Linear A folks, hopefully they'll get back to us soon with an update as to whether we've got it correct or not. Hang tight! | | | |
| ▲ | bawolff an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | How does an expert even verify something like this? | | |
| ▲ | Kosturdistan 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | You look at the proposed sound values and compare it to other known languages. Languages from the same family share grammar and vocabulary. | |
| ▲ | sigbottle an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean it's not like anyone could objectively go back in time and query ancient civilizations for what they meant, but presumably it means the verification heuristics, they have currently, pragmatic success, and expert solidarity means that it is "verified" |
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| ▲ | yorwba 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Then why is there no link to the actual write-up? |
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| ▲ | GavinMcG 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Presumably because it hasn’t yet been published? | | | |
| ▲ | Kosturdistan an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The only write-up at the moment is my blog post, hopefully that changes in the coming weeks. | | |
| ▲ | Sniffnoy 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet? |
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| ▲ | m0llusk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It seems this is still extremely early in the process. There is an apparent finding that was shared. Evidence which would be the basis for a paper is "being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge". So they are trying to do the right thing by talking about what they believe they have done but holding off publication and serious claims until later. The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here. | | |
| ▲ | sillysaurusx 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here. Could you rephrase this or explain it more thoroughly? I don’t follow. What does it mean to categorize a written form by systems built with Claude? | | |
| ▲ | tyingq 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The same pattern/tech is generic enough that it might be able to solve other unrelated, and so-far undecipherable, written languages. |
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| ▲ | kelseyfrog 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | You can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result. | | |
| ▲ | _verandaguy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This isn't really a reasonable approach, is it? The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility. If you had the other things, being "stochastic" is not even remotely a show-stopper. Stochastic processes abound and are the reason the mathematics of statistics was developed in the first place, ultimately allowing us to create such things as LLMs. When all the relevant steps gets published, I absolutely expect a lot of people to (attempt to) reproduce this work even though LLMs are stochastic. | | |
| ▲ | _verandaguy an hour ago | parent [-] | | My issue with this is that it's a form of "soft" reproducibility, where it'll work for many (maybe even most!) people, but that depends on the way the original prompt was formulated (read on) and the state of the random noise in the system. On the prompt formulation; prompts with very similar formulations (in terms of both semantics, hamming distance, or both) can lead to _wildly divergent_ outputs in my experience. It's not rigourous, and when that divergence happens, it's extremely difficult (arguably impossible, by nature of the architecture of transformers) to identify why the divergence happened and where. |
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| ▲ | Kosturdistan an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Claude code was used to organize the material and to run simulations. The simulations were to determine the likelihood that the text was Semitic vs Tom got lucky. Tom has assigned probabilities to each of the syllables he has proposed sound values for. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sure it is. We're humans, not robots (well, I think I am, and I presume you are as well, but for all we know, we could be living in a simulation), so if the non-deterministic system decides to generate code that calls the variable foo one day and bar the next, as long as the code still does what's being asked of it, why do I care that the non deterministic system chose to call the variable something different when run on Tuesday? There's the computer science definition of determinism and the engineering result of "does it work", which are at odds. It's like the halting problem. We haven't solved the computer science definition of the halting problem, but give some C code with a loop that won't terminate to Claude, and it'll call that out as not halting. | | |
| ▲ | _verandaguy an hour ago | parent [-] | | All things aside, I think this misses the forest for the trees on the halting problem. It's not about being able to throw claude or codex at a loop and having it evaluate it for halting, it's about being able to do this for arbitrary code. Computer science rigourously defines the halting problem as not computable and undecidable. within the framework of using something akin to static analysis using any deterministic Turing machine. There's not really a question of "solving" the halting problem like there's some as-yet unknown way of generally figuring out if arbitraty code halts. Turing proposed a proof in 1937 in favour of undecidability of what we now know as the halting problem, building on ideas first articulated by Church a few years prior. Frankly, if anything, it's reasonable to say that the halting problem's been solved, just in the direction of undecidability rather than decidability. Anyway, back to LLMs; as code gets more complex, the robot will need a bigger context window, more hardware resources, and more time, all of which will be variable due to the noise inherent in the system. It'll be difficult to put a useful upper and lower bound on how much computing power and time it'll take to figure out if a program ever halts. Which is all a bit moot, frankly, in the context of halting, but useful to keep in mind in the more general context of using these things as analysis tools. |
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| ▲ | iwontberude 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Actually it is because Claude did the work and being a lay person isn’t really that high of a bar. | | |
| ▲ | Kosturdistan an hour ago | parent [-] | | Claude helped, but did not do the work. This was a human dude who had a very helpful assist from Claude |
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| ▲ | TeMPOraL an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > stochastic system Every day when you lower your butt onto your chair, you trust a stochastic system enough to assume you'll rest on the chair safely and not spontaneously phase through, which would lead to rather gory and painful terminal experience. Physics at macro scale is stochastic, which is a good reminder that stochastic != uniformly random. Expected distributions matter. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w a few seconds ago | parent [-] | | While strictly true, QM has such small standard deviations as to be irrelevant on the macro. IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing. |
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| ▲ | atrus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | somehow I suspect it was a bit more involved than: Claude, please solve Linear A. | | | |
| ▲ | justin_dash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unless if it was done by Fable! | | |
| ▲ | kelseyfrog 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The 'major insight' described in the article predates Fable's release by two week four days. It would be a complicated timeline. |
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| ▲ | grey-area 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazing work and refreshing to see a well written and cogent post to summarise it. Would love to hear more about how he used Claude to help solve the puzzle. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | dwroberts 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You know him socially but is there a reason you’re writing this rather than him? It looks like he has his own web presence. Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed |
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| ▲ | Kosturdistan an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Tom knows I'm a freelance writer and decided to give me the scoop. He's more interested in linguistics than he is in journalism. | |
| ▲ | jstanley an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Promoting your friends' work is hardly stealing their thunder. It's increasing their thunder! | |
| ▲ | Conscat 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't it customary for the author of a post shared on HN to leave a comment on the thread? | | |
| ▲ | dwroberts 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not referring to the parent comment: The post is not written by the author of the claimed breakthrough. |
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| ▲ | iwontberude 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What thunder? Claude did the work and used a human to interface with experience and causality better. | | |
| ▲ | Kosturdistan an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Claude helped, it did not do the work. It would have taken Tom more time to crack on his own, and it would have been harder, but the key insights were Tom's not Claude's. | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The thunder is as per the headline. Assuming it passes review. One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit. | | |
| ▲ | iwontberude 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense. No human, individually or as a team, has been able to solve this to date. To the extent this was Claude solving it itself and thus denying Di Mino any thunder, there was nobody to have stolen anything from. To the extent he has thunder to be stolen, it wasn't ever in Claude's possession. | |
| ▲ | timschmidt 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Everything is a Remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9RYuvPCQUA Either all information is stolen, or none is. Can't have it both ways. |
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