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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 15 2018, @08:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the mechanical-turk-2.0 dept.

Ubisoft pledge to make hieroglyph translation algorithm open access

During development [of Assassin's Creed Origins], [Ubisoft] partnered with Egyptologists, and in doing so they apparently discovered that translating hieroglyphs is very difficult and time consuming. In response, they started looking into ways to streamline the process using machine learning, and this week, they presented their initial progress.

[...] Ubisoft's first step was asking for volunteers to trace hieroglyphs on their website, and Assassin's Creed fans were well up for it – "more than 80,000 glyphs were drawn in the tool" on the first night it was active.

[...] Now they've got the basics in place, they've pledged to bring the algorithm into open access by the end of the year, so that academics can both use it and help them to improve it. They're taking the drawing tool and reworking it as a teaching tool for students learning the hieroglyphic script, too.

Ubisoft, Google Cloud and Psycle demonstrate the power of machine learning, lay the ground for automated hieroglyphics translation

The support of Academic contributors around the world has helped shape the Hieroglyphics Initiative. However it is only starting and now requires the contribution of the scientific community to deliver its full promise, therefore the data and tools will open source before the end of the year.

[...] Ubisoft will keep supporting the Hieroglyphics Initiative on the longer term in collaboration with Google Cloud teams as both hope for it to have a long-lasting legacy, and be the basis for more innovations in the study of Middle Egyptian.

2017 video (2m45s).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @08:58PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @08:58PM (#749218)

    See corporate America? You don't NEED to be evil. I've heard complaints about Ubisoft but at least this is one good deed.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:23PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:23PM (#749227)

      Words are cheap, show us the code! And then show us the license!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:58PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @09:58PM (#749243)

        Yes, but failing on the promise is much worse then never offering in the first place. This isn't their game source code so I believe they will follow through. Try to save the cynicism for when reality matches up.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:35AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @11:35AM (#749467)

      Wait until they offer the prime features as paid DLC.

  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday October 15 2018, @08:59PM (2 children)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 15 2018, @08:59PM (#749219) Journal

    They have machine learning, pseudo-roseta stone based translation, with human provided updates in google translate.

    Way back in 2010ish they showed up to an academic "translate a made up language" challenge and won with their production software. So maybe ubisoft just payed google to add one more language? And now they're taking PR credit?

    • (Score: 2) by black6host on Monday October 15 2018, @09:13PM (1 child)

      by black6host (3827) on Monday October 15 2018, @09:13PM (#749223) Journal

      Wow! I thought I was a cynic, LOL. Regardless of the tech used the ability to put it out there and crowd source the input is pretty cool. Hopefully this will end up being very useful to those who study hieroglyphics once it's released.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @10:01PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @10:01PM (#749244)

        It also shows how well we can replace a lot of these centralized services. Need input? Crowd source it! That is what so many big tech companies have done, that is how open street maps works, let us create our own shit and drop the evil buggers.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 15 2018, @11:58PM (#749297)

    As anybody who has worked with automated computer language translation can tell you, this will be fairly bad. I imagine it will be better with a "dead" language, but still, natural language processing is one of the harder aspects of artificial intelligence. As such, I'm sure their automated translation software will be pretty mediocre at best.

    That being said, being mediocre is better than nothing.

    Assuming they follow-through on their "[pledge] to bring the algorithm into open access by the end of the year, so that academics can both use it and help them to improve it," it will be a great boon. This is the kind of thing I could imagine various academic or research software companies charging big money for. If they really do just give it away to the general public, it will be a very generous and helpful thing to do.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:16AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 16 2018, @04:16AM (#749399)

    Maybe, once they get the tech nailed down, they can turn their attention to the modern hieroglyphics known as emoji. Whenever I see them, I can't help thinking that the poster is saying "look at me, I'm an illiterate baboon".

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