AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Overall claim and status

  • Thread discusses a claimed decipherment of Linear A as an extinct Semitic language (possibly ancestral/related to Biblical Hebrew).
  • Researcher reportedly has a draft manuscript shared with linguists at major universities; no preprint or full data is public yet.
  • Many commenters stress this is, at best, an interesting attempt and should not be treated as a solved decipherment until experts review it and further evidence appears.

Role of AI tools

  • An AI coding assistant was used mainly to:
    • Build Python tools to parse and organize the Linear A corpus (GORILA, SigLA).
    • Run large numbers of simulations to test whether a Semitic signal is statistically stronger than chance.
  • Multiple commenters emphasize the human did the conceptual work; the AI sped up coding and analysis.
  • Others argue the achievement is inseparable from modern tooling; without AI, the work might not have been feasible for a non‑specialist.

Reproducibility and skepticism

  • Strong pushback on the lack of a public manuscript, code, or translation tables (despite claims of ~300 translated words).
  • Concerns that LLM-based workflows are “softly reproducible” due to stochastic outputs and prompt sensitivity.
  • Some liken this to past high‑profile “breakthroughs” that collapsed under scrutiny (e.g., other Linear A claims, room‑temperature superconductors).
  • A classics-focused community elsewhere is reported as dismissive of the claim.

Linguistic and technical issues

  • Linear A is notoriously difficult:
    • Tiny corpus (~7,500 characters across ~1,500 mostly list-like inscriptions).
    • Possibly multiple languages and heavy use of abbreviations.
    • Unknown underlying language and incomplete understanding of the script.
  • Debate over:
    • Whether assuming Linear A signs share values with Linear B is justified.
    • How much can be inferred from recurring formulas like the “libation formula.”
    • Whether mapping fragments of words to Semitic roots is convincing or just cherry-picking amid huge degrees of freedom.
    • Why a Semitic language would be written with a CV syllabary including vowels, given typical consonantal Semitic scripts.

Broader implications

  • Some see promise that AI-augmented methods could help with other undeciphered scripts (e.g., Indus, Isthmian, Voynich).
  • Others argue information-theoretic limits may make fully cracking an unknown language/script pair impossible without more data or bilingual texts.