Did You Know? New Computer Program to Read Ancient Text

Itay Bar-Yosef, a researcher from Ben-Gurion University, points to a passage of ancient text that a new computer program could help decipher at his office in the southern city of Beersheba August 24, 2009.    REUTERS/Amir Cohen

Researchers at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University have developed a computer program that can decipher previously unreadable ancient texts. The program uses a pattern-recognition algorithm similar to one used to identify and compare fingerprints. But in this case, it identifies letters, words and even handwriting styles, and may lead to a Google-like search engine for historical documents.  Read more in this Reuters report from the Vancouver Sun.