vesuvius challenge
Last fall, we used machine learning to decipher the first letters of a previously unreadable ancient scroll discovered in the ancient Roman villa of Herculaneum as part of the 2023 Mount Vesuvius Challenge. I reported what I did. Nat Friedman, a technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Challenge, is currently announced via X they have (formerly Twitter) won the grand prize $700,000 to create the first readable text. The winning team members were Luke Faritor, Youssef Nader, and Julian Siliger.
As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort city of Pompeii was not the only city destroyed. The catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Several other cities in the region, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were gutted by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic flows. But still, some remnants of Rome’s wealth survived. A palatial mansion in Herculaneum, thought to have once belonged to a man named Piso, houses hundreds of rare scrolls made from papyrus burned to carbon by volcanic gases. was kept.
The scrolls were buried under volcanic mud until the 1700s, when archaeologists believed they kept the personal library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. More scrolls may still lie in the lower floors of the villa that have not yet been excavated. Several opened fragments have helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including: about nature There are works by Epicurus and some works by Philodemus himself, as well as some works in Latin. However, the more than 600 scrolls were so fragile that they could crumble even if touched, and it was long believed that they could never be read.
Brent Searles’ lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum Documents for many years.he another way He was filmed in 2016 ‘opening up’ a scroll found on the west bank of the Dead Sea and using it to reveal the first few verses of Leviticus, ‘virtually unrolling’ the damaged scroll. .of Combined team approach Combines digital scanning with micro-computed tomography (a non-invasive technique often used for cancer imaging) and segmentation to digitally create pages, along with enhanced texturing and flattening techniques. Masu. Then they developed the software (volume cartography) Virtually expands the scroll.
vesuvius challenge
However, because the old Herculaneum scrolls were written with carbon-based ink (charcoal and water), CT scans did not show the same fluorescence. But Searles thought the scans could still pick up the tiny texture differences that mark the inky and blank areas of the papyrus, and that he could train an artificial neural network to do just that. And a few years ago, he had two of his intact scrolls analyzed at the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory in Oxford.
Later, technology entrepreneurs Friedman and Daniel Gross heard about Searles’ work and decided that crowdsourcing could help them decipher the scroll’s contents more quickly, so they all launched the Vesuvius Challenge last March. I decided. Mr. Searles made all scans and codes, as well as images of the flattened sections, available to the public. Around 1,500 teams are collaborating on this challenge through his Discord, and as each milestone is reached, the winning code will also be published so everyone can build on their progress.
