ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Artif. Intell.
Sec. Language and Computation
Volume 8 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frai.2025.1581129
On Automatic Decipherment of Lost Ancient Scripts relying on Combinatorial Optimisation and Coupled Simulated Annealing
Provisionally accepted
- Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, School of Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This paper introduces a novel method for addressing the challenge of deciphering ancient scripts. The approach relies on combinatorial optimisation along with coupled simulated annealing, an advanced technique for non-convex optimisation. Encoding solutions through k-permutations facilitates the representation of null, one-to-many, and many-to-one mappings between signs.In comparison to current state-of-the-art systems evaluated on established benchmarks from literature and three new benchmarks introduced in this study, the proposed system demonstrates superior performance in enhancing cognate identification results.
Keywords: Ancient Script Decipherment, Combinatorial optimisation, k-Permutations, coupled simulated annealing, Evaluation benchmarks
Received: 21 Feb 2025; Accepted: 23 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tamburini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Fabio Tamburini, Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, School of Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.