They haven't unlocked anything. At best, they've gained confidence in the type of lock.<p>The title on the site is bad ("<i>unlock</i> more secrets of ancient script"), especially for a place called "<i>science</i> daily". The title here is atrocious. The end of the first paragraph is "researchers are using mathematics and computer science to <i>try</i> to piece together information about the <i>still-unknown</i> script."
I think the researcher here has confused Bayesian inference with Markov chaining? I'm doubtful this is an effective approach to unlock any kind of -meaning- from the inscriptions.<p>If this isn't an article for PG's comment, I don't know what is :)
such an approach might teach them everything about the language's syntax but nothing about its semantics.. but i guess deciphering that would be a lot easier once they can identify the structural components of the sentences
the paper be found here:
<a href="http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0901/0901.3017v1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0901/0901.3017v1.pdf</a>