An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.
replySome of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
It would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills
replyku-ro obviously means "carry in" :)
replyThey hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.
replySurprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
reply“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)
replyVery vaguely, it makes it like a one-time pad where it can be anything you want it to be. Not quite, but so little text leaves a lot of options open.
replyI wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy?
replyObviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.
Yes. Somewhere in Claude Shannon's work, called the "unicity distance".
replyI would love to have this image available!
replyI’d send it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand it.
replyAs observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.
replywhen I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard
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