AI models makes precise copies of cuneiform characters

Deciphering some people’s writing can be a major challenge – especially when that writing is cuneiform characters imprinted into 3,000-year-old tablets. Now, Middle East scholars can use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and copy over cuneiform characters from photos of tablets, letting them read complicated scripts with ease. Along with Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform is one of the oldest known forms of writing, and consists of more than 1,000 unique characters. The appearance of these characters can vary across eras, cultures, geography and even individual writers, making them difficult to interpret. Researchers from Cornell and Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed an approach called ProtoSnap that “snaps” into place a prototype of a character to fit the individual variations imprinted on a tablet. With the new approach, they can make an accurate copy of any character and reproduce whole tablets. “When you go back to the ancient world, there’s a huge variability in the ... Read full article.