Three researchers won a
$700,000
prize for using
artificial intelligence
(AI) to read part of a nearly
2,000-year-old
scroll burned in the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano.
The Herculaneum Papyri consist of some
800 rolled Greek parchments
that were charred during the
eruption of AD 79
.
that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, according to the organizers of the "Vesuvius Challenge" contest.
One of the charred papyri (Vesuvius Challenge).
The scrolls, which look like
logs of hardened ash
and are kept in the Institute of France, in Paris, and in the National Library of Naples, in Italy, have suffered serious damage and have even fallen apart when trying to open them.
A million dollars to the one who deciphered it
Alternatively, the "Vesuvius Challenge" performed high-resolution CT scans of four of the scrolls and offered a million dollars across several prizes to stimulate research on them.
The winning trio consisted of Youssef Nader, a doctoral student in Berlin;
Luke Farritor, SpaceX student and intern in Nebraska (United States);
and Julian Schilliger, Swiss robotics student.
The group used AI to help distinguish ink from papyrus and resolve the faint, almost illegible Greek letter through pattern recognition.
"Some of these texts could
completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world," Robert Fowler, an expert on classicism and president of the Herculaneum Society, told
Bloomberg Businessweek
magazine
.
Part of the carbonized papyri (Vesuvius Challenge).
The challenge required researchers to decipher four passages of
at least 140 characters,
with at least 85% of them recoverable.
Last year Farritor decoded the first word on one of the scrolls, which turned out to be the Greek word for "purple."
According to the organizers, their joint efforts have allowed approximately
5% of the scroll to be decrypted.
A villa belonging to Julius Caesar's father-in-law
The author of the manuscript was "probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus," who wrote
"about music, food and how to enjoy the pleasures of life,"
contest organizer Nat Friedman wrote on the X social network.
Part of the city of Herculaneum (EFE).
The scrolls were found in a villa believed to have belonged to
Julius Caesar's patrician father-in-law,
whose largely unexcavated property housed a library that could contain thousands more manuscripts.
In the next phase of the contest, an attempt will be made to use the research to unravel 85% of the scroll, Friedman added.
AFP Agency.
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