Ubisoft launches The Hieroglyphics Initiative

Yesterday we reported on the Discovery Mode bringing education to Assassin's Creed in 2018, and now Ubisoft has unveiled another announcement to do with the series and its relationship to history, this being The Hieroglyphics Initiative, a "machine learning based research project powered by Google TensorFlow, to simplify the decipherment of hieroglyphics, one of the oldest written languages in the history of mankind," according to the press release.

Ubisoft's collaboration with Google was in an effort to understand hieroglyphics and make it accessible to everyone after realising the challenges of unlocking the secrets of the past.

"The Hieroglyphics Initiative not only has the potential to save us time as Egyptologists, it could unlock the magic of hieroglyphics for a new audience", said Perrine Poiron, Egyptologist, Ph. D student (Sorbonne/UQAM).

Machine learning is used to develop artificial intelligence, and image recognition is a part of that, meaning the machine can identify an object by learning what images it contains. This is what's being used in in The Hieroglyphics Initiative, identifying hand-carved symbols.

This project is gathering imagery of Middle Period Egyptian hieroglyphics in their original forms, as well as samples of thousands of hieroglyphs that have been translated and identified in the past, all with the help of historians and specialists.

"By making the Hieroglyphics Initiative an open source project, we aim to create a new connection between two things that we love at Ubisoft - history and technology", said Pierre Miazga, Hieroglyphics Initiative Project Coordinator at Ubisoft. Future contributors can also register on the Hieroglyphics Initiative website at this link.

Do you think video games have more potential to interacting with real world studies?