I was watching this TED presentation and wanted to dig in a little more. The video at the bottom is a great watch and listen. I'm fascinated in this type of stuff.
Early examples of the symbol system are found in an Early Harappan and Indus civilisation context, dated to possibly as early as the 35th century BCE.[19][20] In the Mature Harappan period, from about 2600 BCE to 1900 BCE, strings of Indus signs are commonly found on flat, rectangular stamp seals as well as many other objects including tools, tablets, ornaments and pottery. The signs were written in many ways, including carving, chiseling, painting and embossing, on objects made of many different materials, such as soapstone, bone, shell, terracotta, sandstone, copper, silver and gold.[21] Often, animals such as bulls, elephants, rhinoceros, water buffaloes and the mythical unicorn accompanied the text on seals to help the illiterate identify the origin of a particular seal. - wikipedia
I posted another symbol video a while back, here is the link. Also really worth a watch.
The video that got me looking is below. I now have all these symbols in my head. Almost have the 32 symbols down, now these.
Artificial Intelligence Is Cracking 4,000-Year-Old Indus Valley Mystery
Using AI Methods
Every language has a sequential structure. We, humans, try to formalize and order our way of communication. AI Methods are good at learning such patterns and structures. Therefore, the field of applying AI methods to understand the human communication is called “Natural language Processing”.
Researchers, Nisha Yadav from TIFR, and Rajesh Rao from the University of Washington, have used such AI Methods to discover the hidden structure of the Indus Scripts. Their method is similar to how Google’s Autocomplete works.
