'Pythia' helps find missing parts of Ancient Greek inscriptions

Researchers at Oxford University and DeepMind Technologies, a UK-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) company owned by Alphabet Inc. - a conglomerate best known as the parent company of Google - have created "Pythia," an ancient text restoration system that outperforms experts in guessing the missing text from partially destroyed Ancient Greek inscriptions.

The fully automated system, the first of its kind, fills the missing characters, or even whole words, by making alternative proposals. It can thus become a very useful tool for experts trying to read and restore ancient inscriptions, dozens of which are discovered each year to be added to the existing trove of several thousands.

The passage of time has not been kind to many of those inscriptions, which have either been partially destroyed or the material they have been written in corroded. Deciphering them is not...

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