Ghost of a flea

I once joked with a fellow gamer that it was a good thing that most gaming stores were in “bad” areas of town . . . because if someone recognized you there you could always say you were visiting the strip club or the porno magazine store (so much better than admitting you were a gamer). Protective coloration, so to speak.

Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the program that the language was related to another known language, in this case Hebrew. The system is then able to make assumptions about the way different words are formed and whether they consist of a prefix and a suffix, for example.

Through repeated analysis, the program linked letters and words to map nearly all Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents in a matter of hours.