Emily Chan
Before the British blew the stone up, a politician named William Bland and a philologist named James Prinsep created a hand drawing of it in 1837.
Later, the administrator of the British East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, attempted to interpret the script. However, the stone was blown up before he could make real progress.
A couple of centuries later, Cacciafoco and his team are using AI to try to solve the mystery. They have started constructing an AI tool named Read-y Grammarian.
It is designed to use advanced computational methods to analyze the stone’s text. AI can’t just simply decode the text, though.
The original stone measured roughly three meters by three meters and contained 50 to 52 lines of text.
But, there are only a few fragments of stone left, which means there is not enough text to work with. So, the researchers will need to introduce other known languages from nearby geographical regions to the AI model.
As it completes its analyses, the tool generates possible lines of text that the team can evaluate further.
Hopefully, they will be able to decipher the ancient script and perhaps even use the tool they are building for other similar texts that no one can comprehend.
