As if being a scholar in ancient Greek wasn’t hard enough fundamentally, the primary texts they rely on are frequently damaged beyond repair, being as they are thousands of years old. Historians may have a powerful new tool in Ithaca, a machine learning model built by DeepMind that makes surprisingly accurate guesses at missing words and the location and date of the text. It’s an unusual application of AI, but one that demonstrates how useful it can be outside the tech world.
The problem of incomplete ancient texts goes across many disciplines in which experts work with degraded materials. The original document might be made of stone, clay or papyrus, written in Akkadian, ancient Greek or Linear A, and describe anything …
