This week, three researchers won a $700,000 prize for using artificial intelligence to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that had been burned by a volcanic eruption. mount vesuvius. One expert said the discovery could 'rewrite the history' of the ancient world.
The Herculaneum Papyrus is roughly structured as follows: 800 rolled up Greek scrolls According to the organizers of the 'Vesuvius Challenge', it was carbonized by a volcanic eruption in 79 that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.
This scroll, housed in the French Institute in Paris and the National Library of Naples, was not only severely damaged but even crumpled when the hardened ash was spread out like a hardened log.
As an alternative, the Vesuvius Challenge offered $1 million in multiple awards to perform high-resolution CT scans of the four scrolls and promote research on them.
The trio that won the $700,000 grand prize consisted of Youssef Nader, a doctoral student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a SpaceX intern from Nebraska, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics engineering student.
The group used AI to distinguish between ink and papyrus and resolve faint, barely legible Greek letters through pattern recognition.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, classicist and president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
The task required researchers to decode four passages of at least 140 characters, and they were able to recover at least 85% of the letters.
Last year, Farritor deciphered the first words on one of the scrolls, which turned out to be Greek for “purple.” It won first place in the First Letters Prize. A few weeks later, Nader took second place by decoding several text columns.
As for Schilliger, he won three awards for his work on a tool called “Volume Cartographer, which enables 3D mapping of the area of papyrus visible in front of you.”
According to organizers, their efforts have now resulted in about 5% of the scrolls being deciphered.
The author of the scroll “casts shade”
The scroll's author was “probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus” and wrote about “how to enjoy music, food and the pleasures of life,” contest organizers wrote. Nat Friedman On social media.
The scrolls were discovered in a villa previously thought to have belonged to Julius Caesar's noble father-in-law, whose largely unexcavated property had a library that could have housed thousands of manuscripts.
The contest was the brainchild of Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Friedman, founder of Github, a software and coding platform acquired by Microsoft. “60 Minutes” correspondent Bill Whitaker previously reportedSeales gained fame by digitally restoring damaged medieval manuscripts using software he designed.
The recovery of never-before-seen ancient texts would be a huge breakthrough. Only about 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts have survived, according to data from the University of California, Irvine.
Federica Nicolardi, of the University of Naples Federico II, told The Guardian newspaper: “This is the beginning of a revolution in the papyriology of Herculaneum and in Greek philosophy in general. This is the only library that has come to us from ancient Roman times,” she said.
In the final section, the scroll's author throws shade at his unnamed ideological enemies, perhaps the ascetics, who “have nothing to say about pleasure in general or specifically,” Friedman said.
The next stage of the competition will attempt to unlock 90% of the scrolls using research, he added.
“In 2024, our goal is to go from 5% of one scroll to 90% of all four scrolls scanned, and to establish a foundation for all 800 scrolls to be read,” organizers wrote.