Breaking the Code: The Decipherment of Late 3rd–Early 2nd Millennium BCE Iranian Linear Elamite Writing First discovered in Susa in 1903, Linear Elamite writing is one of the world’s oldest writing systems, alongside Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. This talk aims to present the steps that led to its decipherment between 2017 and 2020 while highlighting its very original phonetic structure. Examples of newly deciphered texts will also be provided, along with discussions on newly emerging linguistic questions.

30 Years of Perplexity Computational linguists have been trying for decades to accurately predict the next word in running text. Why were they so determined to succeed at this strange task? How did they track their successes (and failures)? Why was the word-prediction task at the center of early statistical work in text compression, code-breaking, machine translation, and speech recognition? Will word prediction lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI)? I’ll attempt to answer these questions with formulas and anecdotes drawn from three decades of research in various fields.

A metahistory of the breaking of the Enigma ciphers. Why has the picture of this adventure been distorted to such an extent? by Marek Grajek Marek Grajek is a retired consultant in cryptology applications and a historian of the discipline. He is the author of more than a dozen books in this field. Back to program