Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

This article is 3566 words. 15 pages long when copied onto libreoffice.

I like reading as much as the next person, but this kind of articles is starting to get ridiculous.

It's like, it starts with an interesting but otherwise straightforward title, you click, and then you're presented with a novel. One structured in such a way so as to make trying to glance to find the relevant sections yields zero information. Nope, you are required to read all about how someone grew without a dog and how their grandmother had lovely spots on her hands and her skin was like paper, before you can even get an inkling where the information lies in the article, if it's there at all.

I've read countless articles like this by now, where you go through the whole 'novel', and the information you were looking for is on paragraph 67 out of 103, and it's basically the line "Well, we don't really know."

    (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Here, let me tell you about the story when I once added 1 + 1 together. You'll never believe the result:

"Jonathan was a keen hiker. When his wife got pregnant in the mid nineties, he could never imagine that his great-great-great-great-great grandson would ever be faced with the 1+1 problem [...]"

> I've read countless articles like this by now, where you go through the whole 'novel', and the information you were looking for is on paragraph 67 out of 103, and it's basically the line "Well, we don't really know."

That's basically the outcome here. It talks briefly about a few different approaches and doesn't really touch on the likelihood of success.

I just grepped for " AI" and read the few paragraphs that popped up. Although looking for "algorithm" proved slightly more interesting:

> For now, the mysteries of the Indus script continue to elude decipherment. Last year, in a follow-up paper to their work automating the decoding of Ugaritic and Linear B, Luo and his team made a small but crucial advance: an algorithm aimed at identifying possible related languages of undeciphered writing systems. Potentially, this could help address the problem of deciphering scripts that don’t yet have a known language they can be compared against. When Luo and his team tested their model on the Iberian language, which has historically been linked to Basque, their findings suggested the two languages were not in fact close enough to be related — a conclusion that corroborated recent scholarship on the matter.

I'd want to see this applied to dolphin clicks. Not sure it would get anywhere, but if an existing human language turns out to have similar grammatical and linguistic constructs, it might get the ball rolling on communicating.

In addition to being a programmer, I have a degree in linguistics and I can read a handful of scripts, and honestly, I don't understand how this "algorithm" could possibly work. When you have two languages written in different alphabets, what are you actually comparing? Even if the underlying languages might be the same, the writing systems can be completely different. And in fact, it seems obvious that a writing system with 80 symbols is not comparable to one with 400.

Honestly, the thing I'd want to see this applied to is something like Chinese in Chinese script vs. the same texts in transliteration.

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