MOSCOW, January 18. /tass/. Russian scientists have deciphered ancient Tibetan manuscripts with 94% accuracy using artificial intelligence (AI). This was told by the Chairman of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SB RAS) Valentin Parmon during the meeting of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"We agreed to use artificial intelligence to recognize Tibetan manuscripts, and it was successfully done, it's for extra–budgetary resources - 94% correct interpretation of these manuscripts," Parmon said, adding that the work was done by the staff of the Institute of Mongolian Studies SB RAS.
Employees of the Institute of Mongolian Studies, Buddhology and Tibetology (IMBT) SB RAS, Novosibirsk State University, and the MTS Artificial Intelligence Center and the leadership of the Presidium of the SB RAS are working on the project to decrypt Tibetan manuscripts. Boris Bazarov, Director of the IMBT SB RAS, told TASS that about 500 pages of Tibetan manuscripts were decrypted at the first stage of the work. Scientists hope that in the future machine learning will provide a more accurate reading of ancient texts and even make it possible to translate manuscripts into Russian.
"This is the world's first experience of deciphering Tibetan texts. The Center for Oriental Manuscripts and Woodcuts of the IMBT SB RAS has about one hundred thousand manuscripts - canonical, didactic, medical texts, with which generations of outstanding scientists have worked. The work on deciphering will give a more adequate idea of ancient knowledge, will allow us to put into circulation colossal material and begin positive cooperation with Tibet," Bazarov added.
According to him, it is assumed that the project will have a second stage, it will be an attempt to read manuscripts, publications in the Old Mongolian language. "It turned out that when Buryatia switched to Cyrillic, a huge number of books, information, manuscripts that contain the history of Buryatia, Mongolia are not readable, because they lost their knowledge, a small number of specialists remained in this language," Parmon explained.
The project was supported by the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexander Sergeev, who recalled that Ulan-Ude has a unique collection of ancient Tibetan manuscripts, and it is the most complete in the world. "Colleagues have applied new capabilities to deciphering ancient Tibetan manuscripts. 94% of the coincidence with what has been deciphered by other methods is a very strong result," the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences said.