On automatic decipherment of lost ancient scripts relying on combinatorial optimisation and coupled simulated annealing

This paper introduces a novel method for addressing the challenge of deciphering ancient scripts. The approach relies on combinatorial optimisation along with coupled simulated annealing, an advanced technique for non-convex optimisation. Encoding solutions through k-permutations facilitates the representation of null, one-to-many, and many-to-one mappings between signs. In comparison to current state-of-the-art systems evaluated on established benchmarks from literature and three new benchmarks introduced in this study, the proposed system demonstrates superior performance in enhancing cognate identification results.