Washington: Three researchers on Monday, were awarded a $700,000 prize for using artificial intelligence to read a 2,000-year-old scroll damaged in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
The Herculaneum papyri, consisting of around 800 Greek scrolls, were carbonized during the volcanic eruption in 79 CE that buried Pompeii. These scrolls, resembling logs of hardened ash, are stored at Institut de France in Paris and the National Library of Naples. Previous attempts to unroll them resulted in extensive damage.
To address this, the Vesuvius Challenge used high-resolution CT scans on four scrolls, offering one million dollars across various prizes to encourage research. The winning trio includes Youssef Nader, a Berlin-based PhD student, Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.
Using AI, the group distinguished ink from papyrus and decoded the faint and nearly illegible Greek lettering through pattern recognition.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
The challenge tasked researchers with interpreting four passages, each with a minimum of 140 characters and at least 85 percent of characters recoverable.
Farritor successfully decoded the first word from one scroll last year, revealing it to be the Greek word for “purple.”
Collectively, their efforts have unveiled approximately five percent of the scroll, as reported by the organizers.
The probable author of the scroll is the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, who wrote about topics such as music, food, and the enjoyment of life’s pleasures, according to contest organizer Nat Friedman on X.
These scrolls were discovered in a villa believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. The property, mostly unexcavated, houses a library that might contain thousands more manuscripts.
The competition idea came from Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Nat Friedman, the creator of Github, a software and coding platform acquired by Microsoft.
Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Friedman, the founder of Github, a software and coding platform purchased by Microsoft, initiated the competition.
Recovering previously unseen ancient texts would be a significant achievement. Data from the University of California, Irvine, indicates that only around 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts have endured.
“This is the start of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and in Greek philosophy in general. It is the only library to come to us from ancient Roman times,” Federica Nicolardi of the University of Naples Federico II told The Guardian newspaper.
In the closing section, the author of the scroll “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 aims to use the findings to unravel 85 percent of the scroll, he further mentioned.
