$250,000 For Whoever Can Decipher Scrolls Charred By Mount Vesuvius
Historians are hoping to soon read some of the wise texts by ancient philosophers and poets which were buried and blackened after Mount Vesuvius’ deadly eruption in AD79, taking down Pompeii and the neighboring Herculaneum.
Now, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is backing a competition, entitled the ‘Vesuvius Challenge’, to reward anyone who can properly interpret the papyrus scrolls using machine learning and computer vision. A prize of US$250,000 will be shared among participants who can identify the ink or read out sentences from the papers, known as the Herculaneum papyri.
We're using a particle accelerator and AI to read a lost library from a dead empire.
— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) March 15, 2023
People have been trying to read the Herculaneum Papyri for 275 years.
With your help, we'll do it in 2023.
Thrilled to announce the Vesuvius Challenge:https://t.co/KYVyona2fW pic.twitter.com/Fl8o0kp1O6
The scrolls belonged in a library of a luxurious villa once owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Then disaster struck and rendered the text unreadable.
A farmer discovered the villa in 1750. Alas, as a result of the passage of time and careless human handling, many of the scrolls from its library were destroyed since.
All told, while the heat of the blast carbonized the Herculaneum papyri and left them illegible, it also preserved them for nearly 2,000 years underground.
Upon validation that the 600 remaining scrolls could be virtually unraveled using X-rays, a team of researchers led by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, are extending a global offer to “solve this ancient puzzle.”
Early this year, the scientists successfully extracted letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the scrolls via an artificial intelligence model, proving that it was possible to decipher them without touching or damaging the fragile paper. During the imaging process, the AI even picked up characters hidden in layers of papyrus.
The team says it is kicking off the Vesuvius Challenge to “scale up” efforts in understanding what was written on the charred scrolls, Seales tells the Guardian.
With funding by Friedman and American entrepreneur Daniel Gross, the contest will dole out US$250,000 in total to individuals or teams who can make sense of the Herculaneum scrolls.
Those who can distinguish the ink on X-ray scans of the papers will stand to receive US$50,000. Meanwhile, US$150,000 will be set aside for those who can identify “at least four separate passages of continuous and plausible text from the scrolls, each at least 140 characters long.”
“After 275 years, the ancient puzzle of the Herculaneum Papyri has been reduced to a software problem—one that you can help solve!” the website teases.
[via Axios and The Guardian, images via various sources]
