AUTHOR=Tamburini Fabio 

TITLE=On automatic decipherment of lost ancient scripts relying on combinatorial optimisation and coupled simulated annealing

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2025.1581129

DOI=10.3389/frai.2025.1581129

ISSN=2624-8212

ABSTRACT=This paper introduces a novel method for addressing the challenge of deciphering ancient scripts. The approach relies on combinatorial optimisation along with coupled simulated annealing, an advanced technique for non-convex optimisation. Encoding solutions through k-permutations facilitates the representation of null, one-to-many, and many-to-one mappings between signs. In comparison to current state-of-the-art systems evaluated on established benchmarks from literature and three new benchmarks introduced in this study, the proposed system demonstrates superior performance in enhancing cognate identification results.