Blog: Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language?

Can Computers Decipher a 5,000-Year-Old Language?
Smithsonian.com (07/20/09) Zax, David

One of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world is the meaning of the Indus civilization's language, and University of Washington, Seattle professor Rajesh Rao is attempting to crack the 5,000-year-old script using computational techniques. He and his colleagues postulated that such methods could reveal whether the Indus script did or did not encode language by measuring the degree of randomness in a sequence, also known as conditional entropy. Rao's team employed a computer program to measure the script's conditional entropy, and then measured the conditional entropy of several natural languages, the artificial Fortran computer programming language, and non-linguistic systems such as DNA sequences. Comparison between these various readings found that the Indus script's rate of conditional entropy bore the closest resemblance to that of the natural languages. Following the publication of the team's findings in the May edition of Science, Rao and colleagues are studying longer strings of characters than they previously examined. "If there are patterns, we could come up with grammatical rules," Rao says. "That would in turn give constraints to what kinds of language families" the Indus script might belong to.

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