Ancient glyph music series#

In his words, the Nazca Lines-declared a Unesco World Heritage site in 1994-are “facing a crisis of destruction.” Magra reports that Sakai hopes to use this new technology to map out and protect the etchings researchers already know exist. According to an IBM press release, Sakai and his team plan on using the tech giant’s PAIRS Geoscope platform to integrate 10 years of drone and satellite imagery with geographical survey data. In hopes of building on this discovery, the university will continue collaborating with IBM in its search for new Nazca Lines. Its subject stands on two legs, wears a hat of sorts represented by three lines rising above its vaguely television-shaped head, and wields a club or stick in its right hand.

The etching almost resembles a contemporary cartoon character or mascot. “It is in an area that we often investigated, but we did not know the geoglyph existed,” Sakai tells the Verge. Impressively, the A.I.’s suggestion proved accurate: Archaeologists uncovered a previously unknown humanoid figure measuring around 13 feet tall and 6.5 feet wide. The team chose one of these candidates and conducted an on-the-ground investigation during its 2019 field season. only found “several possible” biomorphic ones. Watson ended up finding more than 500 potential glyphs, reports Science News’ Maria Temming, but according to the release, the A.I. Sakurai says, “We specifically built techniques in the deep learning framework to learn and distinguish between these different patterns and sizes of the geoglyphs.”Īerial view of a spider geoglyph at the Nazca Lines, some 435 km south of Lima, Peru, on December 11, 2014 what to look for when tracking down hidden shapes. As Akihisa Sakurai, a researcher with IBM Japan, tells the Verge’s James Vincent, researchers have identified fewer than 100 biomorphic geoglyphs at the site to date each is fairly unique, making it difficult to teach A.I. The team trained the A.I.’s neural network with images of previously identified carvings.įinding the new glyph proved difficult even with Watson’s help. Per Iliana Magra of the New York Times, Sakai and his colleagues collaborated with IBM to teach an artificial intelligence system named Watson to find glyphs overlooked by humans. This fieldwork led to the discovery of the new Nazca lines, which feature 40 biomorphic glyphs depicting animals, plants or people. Initially, the researchers analyzed the area largely through satellite imagery, but as of 2010, the team has also spent time in the field studying the strange desert markings. by members of the Nazca culture, since 2004.

Thanks to a new analysis conducted by an international group of researchers, scientists now have even more glyphs to marvel at: As a press release from Japan’s Yamagata University states, the team has uncovered 143 previously unseen etchings-including the first Nazca Line identified using artificial intelligence.Īccording to the statement, archaeologists led by Yamagata University’s Masato Sakai have been studying the Nazca Lines, created between 200 B.C. The roughly 200-square-mile stretch of land is known for its carvings of geometric shapes, birds, monkeys and humanoid figures.

Ancient glyph music series#

Peru’s Nazca Lines-a series of huge geoglyphs etched into a coastal plain in the country’s southern desert-have mystified archaeologists since they were first spotted nearly a century ago.