Every time I hear “machine learning”, I think “Skynet“.
Ubisoft is trying to bring the past alive with The Hieroglyphics Initiative, a machine learning based project powered by Google TensorFlow. It’s purpose is to make the study and translation of hieroglyphics accessible to everyone. As the story goes:
During the recreation of Cleopatra’s Egypt for Assassin’s Creed Origins, the most ancient time period ever explored in an Assassin’s Creed game, the development team at Ubisoft realised how challenging it still is to unlock the secrets of the past and wondered how modern technology could help. Translating hieroglyphics is a manual and time-consuming process. It has been over 200 years since the Rosetta Stone first helped to understand them. Collaborating closely with Google, Ubisoft set out to explore the potential of machine learning technology in order to make the hieroglyphics written language accessible to everyone.
Naturally, Egyptologists are pretty jazzed about it.
“The Hieroglyphics Initiative not only has the potential to save us time as Egyptologists, it could unlock the magic of hieroglyphics for a new audience – Perrine Poiron, Egyptologist, Ph. D student (Sorbonne/UQAM).
As for the team themselves,they’re happy to making something so academically valuable.
“By making the Hieroglyphics Initiative an open source project, we aim to create a new connection between two things that we love at Ubisoft – history and technology” – Pierre Miazga, Hieroglyphics Initiative Project Coordinator at Ubisoft
Contributors can register on the Hieroglyphics Initiative website at www.hieroglyphicsinitiative.com. And, even if you’re not a fan of Assassin’s Creed, you have to admit that it’s cool something in the real world owes its existence to it.
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