Thursday, April 23, 2009
Indus script
Symbols used 4,000 years ago by the long-lost Indus Valley civilization, about 1500 fragments left.
Ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English were tried on the fragments of the script remaining. Then the crackers gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.
Rajesh P. N. Rao et al used pattern-analyzing software running a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics. The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.
They seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, and it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages. That's about as far as it has got so far.
Citation: "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script." By Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan. Science, Vol. 324 Issue 5926, April 24, 2009.
IMO: Shows what modern pattern-analysing software can do, amongst many likely applications.
Ancient Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English were tried on the fragments of the script remaining. Then the crackers gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.
Rajesh P. N. Rao et al used pattern-analyzing software running a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics. The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic. Spoken languages fell in the middle.
They seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, and it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement. These proved to be moderately ordered, just like spoken languages. That's about as far as it has got so far.
Citation: "Entropic Evidence for Linguistic Structure in the Indus Script." By Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, R. Adhikari and Iravatham Mahadevan. Science, Vol. 324 Issue 5926, April 24, 2009.
IMO: Shows what modern pattern-analysing software can do, amongst many likely applications.
# posted by uv : 7:49 PM
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