Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery

• Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures.

• They fed the program sequences of four spoken languages: ancient
  Sumerian, Sanskrit and Old Tamil, as well as modern English. Then they gave it samples of four non-spoken communication systems: human DNA, Fortran, bacterial protein sequences and an artificial language.

  The program calculated the level of order present in each language. Non-spoken languages were either highly ordered, with symbols and structures following each other in unvarying ways, or utterly chaotic.
  Spoken languages fell in the middle.

  When they seeded the program with fragments of Indus script, it returned with grammatical rules based on patterns of symbol arrangement.

  As for the meaning of the script, the program remained silent.

• But according to Rao, this early analysis provides a foundation for a more comprehensive understanding of Indus script grammar, and ultimately its meaning.