my.blog

My.Projects

Game Baker Easy to use, graphical Game Designer for linux.

Social Comic Book Display your twitter posts in a comic book layout.

Seam Resizer Implementation of seam removal and insertion for photo editing.

Viral Ad Network Make money from your website by showing viral ads on your site.

Santa's Snowy Workshop A highly playable Christmas Real Time Strategy game..

My.Papers

Average Views on YouTube The average daily views/video on YouTube doubles at the end of 2007.

My.Blog

Nerdy news updates and articles

Fig 1

Tim Wintle's Blog

Tim works at Team Rubber, where he uses Python, large computers, and some clever maths to look at the web in new ways. In his free time he codes various other bits of software, and web apps.

Sun, 30 Mar 2008

Looking at Linear A

Linear A is a language discovered around 1900 by Arthur Evans, and thought to have been used in ancient Crete over three and a half thousand years ago, before the invasion of the Myceneans. Although a similar form of writing (Linear B) was deciphered in 1952, what makes Linear A so interesting is that nobody has yet been able to discover exactly what language is being spoken (although various people have made suggestions).

I first came across Linear A through my classics teacher at school, but having re-read Simon Singh's "The Code Book" (a great read for a wide range of people), I eventually got around to having a closer look at it.

Now, I'm no linguistical expert (I only just passed my Classical Greek GCSE), but I have got some experience in various techniques related to computational linguistics, so I thought I would see what I could make of it. Not exactly having an abundant amount of free time, I haven't had a really close look yet, but I thought I would still post this as I find it remarkably interesting (which is something considering I dropped every language I had studied at school as soon as I started my A-levels)

I soon came across John Younger's wonderful online source of Linear A texts, and copied them into a format that I could run though my own software to analyse easily. I soon found several problems, though:

There are very few repeated (complete) words
There are over 63 common letters (each letter corresponds to a syllable), which means you need far more text to perform statistics on than you would in English, with only 26
Most of the surviving texts are in the form of accounting documents, consisting of a person's name, a symbol representing a type of good, and a number - so little regular language use.

So far I have focused on trying to extend the known texts with a couple of letters either side (where the text is missing, or cannot be read with certainty). Initially I worked out the most common letters (unigrams). Here is the list of the number of times I have counted each letter in the text I have analysed (I only looked at texts that had more than one letter together):

Count	Letter (using the notation of J. Younger)
166	A
147	JA
141	NA
137	KU
132	I
123	TA
121	SA
114	SI
112	DA
104	MA
102	KA
101	RE
100	RA
96	TI
96	KI
91	DI
88	TE

A standard way to continue when you find a letter in the origional text that cannot be read with certainty, may be to work down the list of letters and pick the most commonly used letter that seems possible, however this is a very basic way to approach the task.

It would then seem to make sense to look at bigrams, and to see (given the previous or next letter) what is the most commonly occuring letter, however you can instantly see a potential problem with this. With only 166 occurences of the most common letter, each pair of letters would only be expected to occur twice even if every letter was equally likely to follow the common letter. Another problem is shown by looking at the most common pair of letters. I found that the most common pair of letters was "KU-RO" - occuring 39 times - but it turns out that KU-RO is believed to be a word that translates as "Total", so this turns out to be an ineffective way of looking at the text.

Having said all of this, I have found that looking at Linear A is a highly addictive hobby, and I expect I will spend many more days looking at it over the coming years - and since new texts are still being found, the stats we can get from looking at the text will keep getting better.

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Fri, 16 Nov 2007

"Surfer Dude" begins construction of a Theory of Everything

A man who has worked as a hiking guide and a bridge builder, and spends most of his time surfing waves in Hawaii has put forward the outlines of what he hopes will become a "Theory of Everything", based on the group E₈.

For non-physicists, the so called Theory of Everything is a physical theory which would combine the strong and weak forces with the force of gravity in a way that metric models like Einsteins General Relativity have generally been unable to, and has been the main aim of a majority of physicists ever since Einstein published his work.

Veering away from recent models such as String Theory, Garrett Lisi, who has completed a doctorate in theoretical physics, but is not attached to any academic institution, says that he saw the relationships between physical particles reflected in the symmetries of E₈ while reading about it recently.

E₈ is commonly represented as a Lie group, and has some amazing Properties, although honestly I can only understand a little of this.

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Tue, 14 Aug 2007

A few thoughts...

A couple of unrelated thoughts I have had on the universe:

1) taking the proposisions
A It is possible for an autonomous agent to measure a property relating to the universe iff it is possible for an autonomous agent to exist in the universe
B It is possible for an autonomous agent to exist in the universe iff the governing laws and constants of the universe support the creation of autonomous agent.
We are left with the realisation that the very fact an autonomous agent can exist is equivalent to saying that the governing laws of physics support the creation of life.

2) Taking the assumptions:
A Time and space vanish to a discontinuity at the big bang.
B There are an infinate number of universes, each created at a big bang (we shall assume it is a continuum for simplicity).
Then any dimension outside the universe being introduced to represent the direction of causality (i.e. what could be visualised as time) should be perpendicular to all of the dimensions in the universe, however we can freely choose this axis, and thus for any one-dimensional set of universes with varying physical laws, we can find an axis where the overall progression along the axis will tend to lead to an equilibrium state of physical laws which allow the creation of life.
I believe this argument disputes the use of a Darwinian many-universe argument to attempt to disprove the existence of God, although I would be happy to hear any comments.

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Sat, 24 Mar 2007

Welcome to my blog

As my first post I would like to thank anyone who stops by. I am sorry about the lack of information on the site, but I guess I just don't know exactly what I am going to blog about yet.

I probably won't be posting that much as I want to try to keep this blog with a clean feeling, so feel free to add my rss feed to your feedreader, it's much easier than coming back in case I have posted.

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