The headline is technically correct, but quite misleading. The language in question, Ugaritic, was deciphered in 1932. As it was discovered in 1929, it can hardly be said that the decipherment was an arduous process. The significance of the computer program is along the lines of:

> The key strength of our model lies in its ability to incorporate a range of linguistic intuitions in a statistical framework.

As someone working in NLP, this is quite remarkable, and I don't mean to detract from it; but it should be noted that the model (like the linguists) relied on the fact that Ugaritic is closely related to Hebrew. It would be impossible to use such a model to decipher Linear A, which is probably not related to any known language. (But the model could perhaps be used to check if linguists had overlooked any connection between Linear A and another known language.)