A PhD student at the University of Cambridge solves a 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem

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Sanskrit, though not widely spoken, is the sacred language of Hinduism and has been used in science, philosophy, poetry, and secular literature in India over the centuries.

Panini’s grammar, known as Astadhyayi, relied on a system that acts as an algorithm to convert a base and word suffix into grammatically correct words and sentences.

However, two or more Panini rules are often applied simultaneously, creating conflicts.

Panini taught “metarule”, which scholars have traditionally interpreted to mean “in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule which comes later in the sequential order of grammars wins”.

However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr. Rajpupat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarol. Instead, he argued, Panini means that between the rules that apply to the right and left sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule that applies to the right side.

Using this interpretation, he found that Panini’s “language machine” produced grammatically correct words almost without exception.

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