Sunday 26 November 2017

Project status

Isaiah and Ezekiel are the only two books with more than 30 chapters remaining. So I am pushing these two down. Isaiah remains different. My guesswork is only as high as 43% at the moment. The more of this prophet I do, the better the guesses will be. (Perhaps!) I see that some of its verses are very like the language of Kings and so a few verses are almost done when I get to them. But most are single word guesses. We have read and guessed enough of the body of this literature (70%) to say that Isaiah's language is unique in these areas.

I am down to fewer that 50 puzzle pieces that I don't have an initial domain and subdomain for. But there are still over 18,000 pieces that have no guess at all.  Many of these are probably person and location names. Some of the others that I think are known through a semantic domain and even a single or double guess are probably assigned to the wrong stem by the root derivation algorithm (it was less than 80% accurate). Several letter combinations can occur with different stems. E.g. שׁוב and ישׁב have many overlaps in their forms. On a word by word basis there is insufficient information to decide which stem is which. I do not use complex analytical techniques to read these forms with the computer. No Markov chains or probabilities. I would need a team of expert programmers for such stuff. But my algorithms will correct a stem if it is used in a word sequence greater than 2. (Every now and then I wonder if this section of the code is working as it should - but that's a programmer's lifestyle.)

It wasn't long ago (January 2017) that the unknown pieces were double what they are now so we are making progress. Here's a rough manual graph.
Puzzle pieces not yet turned over for the first time - Hebrew Bible, more than 305,000 pieces
Heading towards zero - end of next year perhaps
X axis is number of days ago
On the gross measurement front, we have 297 chapters to go. Next on my list is Isaiah 7. Highest on the list (most words already guessed) is Joshua 11 but it will probably wait till another chapter or two from Ezekiel is done and maybe another from Genesis.

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