Scientists Digitally 'Unroll' 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Scorched by Mount Vesuvius
he Herculaneum scrolls have remained one of the many tantalizing mysteries of the ancient world for almost 2,000 years. Burnt to a crisp by lava from Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, the reams of rolled-up papyrus were discovered in a mansion in Herculaneum — an ancient Roman town near Pompeii — in the mid-18th century. Both towns were decimated by the Vesuvius eruption, and most of the scrolls were so badly charred they were impossible to open.
Over the next two and a half centuries, attempts were made to unfurl some of the hundreds of scrolls using everything from rose water and mercury to vegetable gas and papyrus juice, according to the New Yorker.
The few that could be opened were philosophical texts written in ancient Greek. But most of the scrolls were so badly damaged, they were considered illegible. More recently, researchers managed to decipher some select words using artificial intelligence, X-ray and CT scans to distinguish ink from the papyrus it was printed on.
The mystery is still unravelling, and on Wednesday, a major breakthrough was announced. Researchers say they've now managed to digitally unroll and start reading one of the ancient scrolls. The scroll in question, known as PHerc. 172, is one of three stored at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries in England.]
A team involved in the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition offering prize money to anyone who can help unlock the delicate scrolls, says it has virtually unwrapped the papyrus to reveal columns of text that Oxford scholars have already started working to decipher.
"This scroll contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll," said Brent Seales, one of the co-founders of the challenge.
"We're confident we will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety, and it's the first time we've really been able to say that with high confidence," project lead Stephen Parsons told CBS News' partner network BBC News. "Now we can work on making it show up more clearly. We're going to go from a handful of words to really substantial passages."
The breakthrough came when the team at the Bodleian Libraries brought the blackened scroll to the Diamond Light Source research facility in nearby Oxfordshire, where technicians used a massive machine called a synchrotron to create a powerful X-ray beam that was able to peer into the fragile relic without damaging it.
Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum
"It can see things on the scale of a few thousandths of a millimeter," Adrian Mancuso, the facility's director of physical sciences, told the BBC. "We have to work out which layer is different from the next layer so we can unroll that digitally."
Last year, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that three young students had won its $700,000 grand prize for using AI to help researchers read about 5% of another scroll, the subject of which was Greek Epicurean philosophy.
The scroll that the team at the Bodleian Libraries recently unfurled is assumed to be on the same subject.
"I just love that connection with whoever collected them, whoever wrote them, whoever rolled those scrolls up and put them on the shelves," Nicole Gilroy, head of book conservation at the Bodleian Libraries, told the BBC. "There's a real human aspect to it that I just think is really precious."
A few years ago, during one of California’s steadily worsening wildfire seasons, Nat Friedman’s family home burned down. A few months after that, Friedman was in Covid-19 lockdown in the Bay Area, both freaked out and bored. Like many a middle-aged dad, he turned for healing and guidance to ancient Rome. While some of us were watching Tiger King and playing with our kids’ Legos, he read books about the empire and helped his daughter make paper models of Roman villas. Instead of sourdough, he learned to bake Panis Quadratus, a Roman loaf pictured in some of the frescoes found in Pompeii. During sleepless pandemic nights, he spent hours trawling the internet for more Rome stuff. That’s how he arrived at the Herculaneum papyri, a fork in the road that led him toward further obsession. He recalls exclaiming: “How the hell has no one ever told me about this?”
The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical. The scrolls were buried inside an Italian countryside villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that froze Pompeii in time. To date, only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the villa that’s been excavated. But it’s thought that the villa, which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar’s prosperous father-in-law, had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of thousands more. Such a haul would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered, and the conventional wisdom among scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, plays and philosophy by manyfold. High on their wish lists are works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sappho and Sophocles, but some say it’s easy to imagine fresh revelations about the earliest years of Christianity.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” says Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, a charity that tries to raise awareness of the scrolls and the villa site. “This is the society from which the modern Western world is descended.”
The reason we don’t know exactly what’s in the Herculaneum papyri is, y’know, volcano. The scrolls were preserved by the voluminous amount of superhot mud and debris that surrounded them, but the knock-on effects of Mount Vesuvius charred them beyond recognition. The ones that have been excavated look like leftover logs in a doused campfire. People have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them—sometimes carefully, sometimes not. And the scrolls are brittle. Even the most meticulous attempts at unrolling have tended to end badly, with them crumbling into ashy pieces.
In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.
But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.
After studying the problem for some time and ingratiating himself with the classics community, Friedman, who’s left GitHub to become an AI-focused investor, decided to start a contest. Last year he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering $1 million in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll. “Maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried,” he recalls thinking. “My life has validated this notion again and again.”
As the months ticked by, it became clear that Friedman’s hunch was a good one. Contestants from around the world, many of them twentysomethings with computer science backgrounds, developed new techniques for taking the 3D scans and flattening them into more readable sheets. Some appeared to find letters, then words. They swapped messages about their work and progress on a Discord chat, as the often much older classicists sometimes looked on in hopeful awe and sometimes slagged off the amateur historians.
On Feb. 5, Friedman and his academic partner Brent Seales, a computer science professor and scroll expert, plan to reveal that a group of contestants has delivered transcriptions of many more than four passages from one of the scrolls. While it’s early to draw any sweeping conclusions from this bit of work, Friedman says he’s confident that the same techniques will deliver far more of the scrolls’ contents. “My goal,” he says, “is to unlock all of them.”
Before Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town of Herculaneum sat at the edge of the Gulf of Naples, the sort of getaway wealthy Romans used to relax and think. Unlike Pompeii, which took a direct hit from the Vesuvian lava flow, Herculaneum was buried gradually by waves of ash, pumice and gases. Although the process was anything but gentle, most inhabitants had time to escape, and much of the town was left intact under the hardening igneous rock. Farmers first rediscovered the town in the 18th century, when some well-diggers found marble statues in the ground. In 1750 one of them collided with the marble floor of the villa thought to belong to Caesar’s father-in-law, Senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, known to historians today as Piso.
During this time, the first excavators who dug tunnels into the villa to map it were mostly after more obviously valuable artifacts, like the statues, paintings and recognizable household objects. Initially, people who ran across the scrolls, some of which were scattered across the colorful floor mosaics, thought they were just logs and threw them on a fire. Eventually, though, somebody noticed the logs were often found in what appeared to be libraries or reading rooms, and realized they were burnt papyrus. Anyone who tried to open one, however, found it crumbling in their hands.
Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.
Today the villa remains mostly buried, unexcavated and off-limits even to the experts. Most of what’s been found there and proven legible has been attributed to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet, leading historians to hope there’s a much bigger main library buried elsewhere on-site. A wealthy, educated man like Piso would have had the classics of the day along with more modern works of history, law and philosophy, the thinking goes. “I do believe there’s a much bigger library there,” says Richard Janko, a University of Michigan classical studies professor who’s spent painstaking hours assembling scroll fragments by hand, like a jigsaw puzzle. “I see no reason to think it should not still be there and preserved in the same way.” Even an ordinary citizen from that time could have collections of tens of thousands of scrolls, Janko says. Piso is known to have corresponded often with the Roman statesman Cicero, and the apostle Paul had passed through the region a couple of decades before Vesuvius erupted. There could be writings tied to his visit that comment on Jesus and Christianity. “We have about 800 scrolls from the villa today,” Janko says. “There could be thousands or tens of thousands more.”
In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”
Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”
By 2016 he and his students had managed to read the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred ancient Hebrew text, by programming their specialized software to detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it. The software made the letters light up against a darker background. Seales’ team had high hopes to apply this technique to the Herculaneum papyri, but those were written with a different, carbon-based ink that their imaging gear couldn’t illuminate in the same way.
Over the past few years, Seales has begun experimenting with AI. He and his team have scanned the scrolls with more powerful imaging machines, examined portions of the papyrus where ink was visible and trained algorithms on what those patterns looked like. The hope was that the AI would start picking up on details that the human eye missed and could apply what it learned to more obfuscated scroll chunks. This approach proved fruitful, though it remained a battle of inches. Seales’ technology uncovered bits and pieces of the scrolls, but they were mostly unreadable. He needed another breakthrough.
Friedman set up Google alerts for Seales and the papyri in 2020, while still early in his Rome obsession. After a year passed with no news, he started watching YouTube videos of Seales discussing the underlying challenges. Among other things, he needed money. By 2022, Friedman was convinced he could help. He invited Seales out to California for an event where Silicon Valley types get together and share big ideas. Seales gave a short presentation on the scrolls to the group, but no one bit. “I felt very, very guilty about this and embarrassed because he’d come out to California, and California had failed him,” Friedman says.
On a whim, Friedman proposed the idea of a contest to Seales. He said he’d put up some of his own money to fund it, and his investing partner Daniel Gross offered to match it.
Seales says he was mindful of the trade-offs. The Herculaneum papyri had turned into his life’s work, and he wanted to be the one to decode them. More than a few of his students had also poured time and energy into the project and planned to publish papers about their efforts. Now, suddenly, a couple of rich guys from Silicon Valley were barging into their territory and suggesting that internet randos could deliver the breakthroughs that had eluded the experts.
More than glory, though, Seales really just hoped the scrolls would be read, and he agreed to hear Friedman out and help design the AI contest. They kicked off the Vesuvius Challenge last year on the Ides of March. Friedman announced the contest on the platform we fondly remember as Twitter, and many of his tech friends agreed to pledge their money toward the effort while a cohort of budding papyrologists began to dig into the task at hand. After a couple of days, Friedman had amassed enough money to offer $1 million in prizes, along with some extra money to throw at some of the more time-intensive basics.
Friedman hired people online to gather the existing scroll imagery, catalog it and create software tools that made it easier to chop the scrolls into segments and to flatten the images out into something that was readable on a computer screen. After finding a handful of people who were particularly good at this, he made them full members of his scroll contest team, paying them $40 an hour. His hobby was turning into a lifestyle.
The initial splash of attention helped open new doors. Seales had lobbied Italian and British collectors for years to scan his first scrolls. Suddenly the Italians were now offering up two new scrolls for scanning to provide more AI training data. With Friedman’s backing, a team set to work building precision-fitting, 3D-printed cases to protect the new scrolls on their private jet flight from Italy to a particle accelerator in England. There they were scanned for three days straight at a cost of about $70,000.
Seeing the imaging process in action drives home both the magic and difficulty inherent in this quest. One of the scroll remnants placed in the scanner, for example, wasn’t much bigger than a fat finger. It was peppered by high-energy X-rays, much like a human going through a CT scan, except the resulting images were delivered in extremely high resolution. (For the real nerds: about 8 micrometers.) These images were virtually carved into a mass of tiny slices too numerous for a person to count. Along each slice, the scanner picked up infinitesimal changes in density and thickness. Software was then used to unroll and flatten out the slices, and the resulting images looked recognizably like sheets of papyrus, the writing on them hidden.
The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.
Luke Farritor was hooked from the start. Farritor—a bouncy 22-year-old Nebraskan undergraduate who often exclaims, “Oh, my goodness!”—heard Friedman describe the contest on a podcast in March. “I think there’s a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity, get the data and get nerd-sniped by it, and we’ll solve it this year,” Friedman said on the show. Farritor thought, “That could be me.”
The early months were a slog of splotchy images. Then Casey Handmer, an Australian mathematician, physicist and polymath, scored a point for humankind by beating the computers to the first major breakthrough. Handmer took a few stabs at writing scroll-reading code, but he soon concluded he might have better luck if he just stared at the images for a really long time. Eventually he began to notice what he and the other contestants have come to call “crackle,” a faint pattern of cracks and lines on the page that resembles what you might see in the mud of a dried-out lakebed. To Handmer’s eyes, the crackle seemed to have the shape of Greek letters and the blobs and strokes that accompany handwritten ink. He says he believes it to be dried-out ink that’s lifted up from the surface of the page.
The crackle discovery led Handmer to try identifying clips of letters in one scroll image. In the spirit of the contest, he posted his findings to the Vesuvius Challenge’s Discord channel in June. At the time, Farritor was a summer intern at SpaceX. He was in the break room sipping a Diet Coke when he saw the post, and his initial disbelief didn’t last long. Over the next month he began hunting for crackle in the other image files: one letter here, another couple there. Most of the letters were invisible to the human eye, but 1% or 2% had the crackle. Armed with those few letters, he trained a model to recognize hidden ink, revealing a few more letters. Then Farritor added those letters to the model’s training data and ran it again and again and again. The model starts with something only a human can see—the crackle pattern—then learns to see ink we can’t.
Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.
In early August, Farritor received an opportunity to put his software to the test. He’d returned to Nebraska to finish out the summer and found himself at a house party with friends when a new, crackle-rich image popped up in the contest’s Discord channel. As the people around him danced and drank, Farritor hopped on his phone, connected remotely to his dorm computer, threw the image into his machine-learning system, then put his phone away. “An hour later, I drive all my drunk friends home, and then I’m walking out of the parking garage, and I take my phone out not expecting to see anything,” he says. “But when I open it up, there’s three Greek letters on the screen.”
Around 2 a.m., Farritor texted his mom and then Friedman and the other contestants about what he’d found, fighting back tears of joy. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is actually going to work. We’re going to read the scrolls.’”
Soon enough, Farritor found 10 letters and won $40,000 for one of the contest’s progress prizes. The classicists reviewed his work and said he’d found the Greek word for “purple.”
Farritor continued to train his machine-learning model on crackle data and to post his progress on Discord and Twitter. The discoveries he and Handmer made also set off a new wave of enthusiasm among contestants, and some began to employ similar techniques. In the latter part of 2023, Farritor formed an alliance with two other contestants, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, in which they agreed to combine their technology and share any prize money.
In the end, the Vesuvius Challenge received 18 entries for its grand prize. Some submissions were ho-hum, but a handful showed that Friedman’s gamble had paid off. The scroll images that were once ambiguous blobs now had entire paragraphs of letters lighting up across them. The AI systems had brought the past to life. “It’s a situation that you practically never encounter as a classicist,” says Tobias Reinhardt, a professor of ancient philosophy and Latin literature at the University of Oxford. “You mostly look at texts that have been looked at by someone before. The idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone’s desk 1,900 years ago is unbelievable.”
A group of classicists reviewed all the entries and did, in fact, deem Farritor’s team the winners. They were able to stitch together more than a dozen columns of text with entire paragraphs all over their entry. Still translating, the scholars believe the text to be another work by Philodemus, one centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses. “Peering at and beginning to transcribe the first reasonably legible scans of this brand-new ancient book was an extraordinarily emotional experience,” says Janko, one of the reviewers. While these passages aren’t particularly revelatory about ancient Rome, most classics scholars have their hopes for what might be next.
There’s a chance that the villa is tapped out—that there are no more libraries of thousands of scrolls waiting to be discovered—or that the rest have nothing mind-blowing to offer. Then again, there’s the chance they contain valuable lessons for the modern world.
That world, of course, includes Ercolano, the modern town of about 50,000 built on top of ancient Herculaneum. More than a few residents own property and buildings atop the villa site. “They would have to kick people out of Ercolano and destroy everything to uncover the ancient city,” says Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II.
Barring a mass relocation, Friedman is working to refine what he’s got. There’s plenty left to do; the first contest yielded about 5% of one scroll. A new set of contestants, he says, might be able to reach 85%. He also wants to fund the creation of more automated systems that can speed the processes of scanning and digital smoothing. He’s now one of the few living souls who’s roamed the villa tunnels, and he says he’s also contemplating buying scanners that can be placed right at the villa and used in parallel to scan tons of scrolls per day. “Even if there’s just one dialogue of Aristotle or a beautiful lost Homeric poem or a dispatch from a Roman general about this Jesus Christ guy who’s roaming around,” he says, “all you need is one of those for the whole thing to be more than worth it.”
AI Helps Decipher First Text of Unreadable Ancient Herculaneum Scroll
With the help of artificial intelligence, a colorful ancient Greek word has emerged from a text damaged in the A.D. 79 eruption of Vesuvius, marking an important milestone in the centuries-long attempt to decipher an unparalleled ancient library assumed to be lost forever.
That word, πορφύραc, referring to purple dye or purple-colored clothes—a color closely associated with royalty and power—comes from one of the famed Herculaneum scrolls discovered by workers digging up the ancient town of Herculaneum near Pompeii in 1752. The roughly 1,800 unearthed papyrus scrolls—believed to contain literary and philosophical works from the first and second centuries B.C.—had been reduced to brittle, charred lumps by the heat and gasses of the eruption. And those carbonized scrolls that workers didn’t throw away more than 250 years ago have largely languished since then in storerooms, written off as unreadable curiosities.
Technological developments over the past two decades have helped researchers get closer to being able to “read” the fragile scrolls. But only the very recent acceleration of artificial intelligence and computing have finally made it possible to begin unlocking their secrets—all without opening them.
Researchers backed by Silicon Valley investors put decoding efforts into overdrive this spring by launching the Vesuvius Challenge.The global competition offers prize money for significant benchmarks in coaxing the long-lost Herculaneum texts from their carbonized husks by applying machine learning techniques to digital images of the scrolls.
The challenge awarded its first installment of the $1 million total prize pot today to two competitors—an American college student and an Egyptian graduate student in Germany—who separately revealed at least 10 letters from a single small area of an intact scroll, including the colorful and complete “πορφύραc.”
With this achievement, scientists say they are now one step closer to being able to read full passages and—someday—entire scrolls that had previously been considered unreadable.
“We knew if we could read just one [scroll], then all the other ones would be available with the same method or some augmented method,” says Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who’s been trying to decode the Herculaneum scrolls for the last 20 years and leads the university’s Digital Restoration Initiative. “And this is a big moment because we are now proving not just to ourselves but to the entire global community that the scrolls are readable.”
Reading the Herculaneum scrolls, he says, will help connect us to the past in “astounding” ways.
“These people were humans just like us,” Seales adds. “These were intellectuals. Their thoughts were complex. It says something about what it means to be human to be able to read a thought that came directly from a single person or a group of people so long ago.”
An era ‘shrouded in mystery’
Since the mid-1700s, people have made various attempts at reading some of the less damaged scrolls from Herculaneum. One method involved cutting the scrolls in half and scraping away layers one at a time to see the text inside; another involved slowly unwinding the scrolls with a specially built machine. Though these 18th and 19th century efforts did allow conservators to copy down some of the words inside, they often damaged—or, worse, totally destroyed—many of the scrolls in the process.
Many of the previously opened scrolls revealed Greek philosophical texts, including some by philosophers Epicurus and Philodemus. But, by and large, the contents of the unopened scrolls are unknown—and that’s part of what makes the quest to open them so enticing. On top of that, the Herculaneum scrolls, discovered in a villa likely belonging to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, represent the largest known surviving library from classical antiquity. Revealing their texts would be a boon to historians and to our collective understanding of the past.
“Some 95 percent of the material from the classical period is lost, so we just don’t have anything, and yet we know it was one of the most important philosophical periods of humanity,” says Seales. “It’s an era shrouded in mystery for which we’ve lost most of the material.”
Between 500 and 600 carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum—kept in museum, university and national collections in England, France and Italy—remain unopened, though the exact figure is hard to estimate because many are fragmented. The scrolls are extremely brittle, which means physically unrolling them is not a viable option. “If you drop one, it would shatter like glass,” Seales explains.
Technological advancements since the early 2000s have helped researchers overcome this hurdle, including using CT scans to make 3D images of ancient scrolls. From there, the Digital Restoration Initiative team developed software that could “virtually unwrap” the 3D images to produce flattened segments. This method enabled them to read previously hidden text from the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred and fragmented scroll from the Middle East dated to the third or fourth century A.D.
When researchers tried to use this method to read the scrolls carbonized by Vesuvius, however, they ran into another roadblock. The ink used on the Ein Gedi scroll contained metal, which meant the letters were visible on the CT scan. The Herculaneum scrolls, by contrast, were written with carbon-based ink, which, to the human eye, makes the symbols indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus on the CT scans.
Undeterred, researchers wondered if higher-resolution scans of the scrolls produced by a particle accelerator could provide an even more detailed view of the carbonized papyrus. Sure enough, at very high resolutions, the scans revealed visible areas where the ink slightly altered the shape and texture of the papyrus fibers. “The carbon-based ink sort of fills in the holes that are the grid of the papyrus—it coats them and makes them a little thicker,” says Seales.
Seales and his Digital Restoration Initiative colleagues then developed and trained a machine learning model to detect these subtle differences in the carbonized papyrus surfaces. But to take the project any further, they needed human beings to help. That’s where the Vesuvius Challenge comes in. Hoping to harness the collective power of citizen scientists around the world, Seales teamed up with Silicon Valley investors and put his team’s data, code, and methods online for anyone to access. The challenge’s pitch? After 275 years, the puzzle of the Herculaneum scrolls has been reduced to a software problem—one that anyone, anywhere with access to a computer could, in theory, contribute to solving.
In March, the challenge team released thousands of 3D images of two rolled-up scrolls, as well as a machine-learning algorithm trained to detect the invisible letters and symbols written on the layers of carbonized papyrus. They also offered $1 million in prize money to incentivize participants to build upon the AI technology and, ultimately, speed up the deciphering.
Two competitors extracted the new snippet of text separately: Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a 26-year-old doctoral student at Freie Universität Berlin. Because Farritor revealed the text first, he wins $40,000, while Nader wins $10,000. Papyrologists also authenticated their findings.
Still on the line is the $700,000 grand prize, which will go to the first person or team that can reveal at least four separate passages from the two scrolls. Each passage must contain at least 140 characters of continuous text, with no more than 15 percent of the characters missing or illegible, by the end of 2023.
Citizen scientists can find everything they need online, from the history of the scrolls themselves to downloadable data, algorithms, and tutorials. And while the contest is open to anyone, it’s technical work that’s so far mostly attracted computer scientists who are already well-versed in machine learning. Competitors are helping advance the project forward by virtually unwrapping additional sections of scrolls via software and methods developed by Seales; they’re also working to improve the machine learning model by providing it with additional training examples from the newly unwrapped digital segments of papyrus.
‘The scrolls are readable’
The competitors—an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 of them in total, according to Seales—have done their part. In just six months, they’ve made huge strides toward solving this puzzle, including the three full lines of text that Farritor and Nader recently revealed. “We’ve seen 10 or 20 person years of work from these competitors,” says Seales.
So, what’s motivating the contestants to volunteer hours and hours of their time toward the project? The prize money is a big factor (both Nader and Farritor say they want to win the grand prize) but, on top of that, some competitors are simply intrigued by the scrolls themselves. “When things were a bit frustrating and things were not working, I felt like I was unable to give up because I was just too curious—I really need to know what’s going on here,” says Nader.
There’s also the allure of working on a project backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman launched the contest, along with venture capitalist Daniel Gross; other startup founders and investors also chipped in prize money. “There’s kind of this Silicon Valley prestige,” says Farritor, who spent the summer interning at SpaceX.
From here, the machine learning model should continue to improve even more and reveal additional letters until, ideally, researchers will be able to decipher all of the Herculaneum scrolls. These efforts could pave the way for future excavation work at Herculaneum, where some experts believe even more scrolls are still buried.
“Some people might think, ‘What are you going to all that trouble for?’ but I don’t believe that,” says Seales. “This is an amazing period in human history. We’re talking about more works from that period. Yeah, I want more, I want it all.”
Researchers used artificial intelligence to decipher the text of 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scripts, unveiling musings on music and cape
I've been waiting for some of the first text since they announced success with AI back in October. It's extremely exciting to think of all the lost ancient works that we may finally find with the scrolls, as well as new copies of text we already have but in fragmented form. THIS is an example of how AI can be used for good.
However if you don't think that physicists being able to shoot xrays through a 2000 year old carbonised papyrus and be able to unroll and read it due to the fact that the ink never soaked into the papyrus, but sat on top and therefore created miniscule bumps that would cause a diffraction pattern from the x-rays that the physicists could then translate into an image isn't one of the coolest things ever please inbox me and I will do my best to persuade you.
