Assassin’s Creed partners with Google TensorFlow for hieroglyphics translation

Assassin’s Creed Origins is due out later this month, taking players to Cleopatra’s Egypt and revisiting one of the most fascinating and mysterious times in the history of the human race. Developer Ubisoft, having spent time exploring and researching this period of history realised that there is still much we don’t know or understand about it, including the mysteries of one of humanities oldest written languages – hieroglyphics.

That’s why, with the aid of Google’s TensorFlow technology, Ubisoft has set up The Hieroglyphics Initiative. The idea is, with the collaboration with Google, that machine learning could help to look through the imagery and research from history and using object identification to identify all the individual differences in each hieroglyph. 

To do that, however, Ubisoft and google need help. The open source project is calling for researchers and historians to add their information to the project, be it previous research or samples of hieroglyphs. The data collected will help in creating the most definitive hieroglyphics translator ever created.

"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 project corrdinator, Pierre Miazga.

“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," added Egyptologist and PhD student, Perrine Poiron.

If you want to help contribute to the initiative or want to find out more information, please visit www.hieroglyphicsinitiative.com