No longer single letters or words, but rather
entire passages dedicated to music, food and the pleasures of life
(probably the work of the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus) were
deciphered for the first time
from one of the
Herculaneum papyri
,
carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD
.. The result, which marks a
turning point in the study of the classical world
, was obtained thanks to
artificial
intelligence by three very young researchers, Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger, winners of the 700 thousand dollar prize offered by
Vesuvius Challenge
international competition
.
The initiative was launched just ten months ago
by Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, who has been involved for years in
using X-ray tomography and artificial intelligence
to reveal the secrets of these damaged ancient documents.
Thanks to the support of two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, a real
competition
was launched (in which around 1,500 computer scientists took part) which included a series of progressive cash prizes, up to the main prize of 700,000 dollars for those who managed to decipher four passages of a papyrus of 140 characters each by 31 December 2023. A
team made up of three very young people
defeated the competition
: the Egyptian doctoral student Youssef Nader, the university student Luke Farritor, an intern at Space , and Julian Schilliger, robotics student at ETH Zurich.
In addition to achieving the objective set by the competition, the three also managed to decipher 11 other columns of text for a total of over 2,000 characters.
“ The text we
have
revealed so far
represents
only 5% of a papyrus
,
”
comments
Nat Friedman on Platform
$100,000 to the first team that can read at least 90% of all four scrolls we scanned."
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