The AI ​​reads an ancient scroll buried by the eruption of Vesuvius

Three researchers won a $700,000 prize Monday for using artificial intelligence to read a 2,000-year-old scroll that was burned during the Mount Vesuvius eruption.

The Herculaneum Papyri are made up of about 800 rolled-up Greek scrolls that were charred during the 79 CE volcanic eruption that buried the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, according to organizers of the “Vesuvius Challenge.”

Resembling logs of hardened ash, the scrolls, kept at the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library in Naples, were extensively damaged and even collapsed when attempts were made to open them.

As an alternative, the Vesuvius Challenge made high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls and offered $1 million across several prizes to spur research on those scrolls.

The winning trio included Youssef Nader, a Ph.D. student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a SpaceX student and intern from Nebraska, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.

The group used AI to distinguish ink from papyrus and determine the faint, almost illegible Greek letters using pattern recognition.

“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.

The challenge required researchers to decipher four passages of at least 140 characters, of which at least 85% were recoverable.

Last year, Farritor decoded the first word on one of the scrolls, which turned out to be the Greek word for “purple.”

Together, their efforts deciphered about five percent of the scroll, according to organizers.

The parchment’s author was “probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus,” writing “about music, food, and enjoying life’s pleasures,” competition organizer Nat Friedman wrote on X.

The scrolls were found in a villa believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s patrician father-in-law, whose mostly unexcavated property housed a library that may have contained thousands of additional manuscripts.

The competition is 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.

The recovery of previously unpublished ancient texts would be a major breakthrough: according to data from the University of California, Irvine, only about 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts have survived.

“It is the beginning of a revolution in the papyrology of Herculaneum and in Greek philosophy in general. It is the only library that has come down to us from Roman times,” said Federica Nicolardi, from the University Federico II of Naples, to The Guardian newspaper.

In the final section, the author of the manuscript “throws shade at unnamed ideological adversaries – perhaps the Stoics? — who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular,” Friedman said.

The next phase of the competition will attempt to leverage research to unlock 85% of the scroll, he added.

© 2024 AFP