Introduced in March 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge pledged a $700,000 prize to the team that could resurrect ancient scripts lost in the ashes of a volcanic eruption.
NAPLES, ITALY - JUNE 27: Fabrizio Diozzi, Conservator and Librarian of the "Officina dei Papiri Ercolanesi" shows a Papyrus Herculaneum in the National Library of Naples, on June 27, 2019 in Naples, Italy. The National Library of Naples (Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli) houses the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of papyrus scrolls carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the first century AD. The papyri contain a number of Greek philosophical texts and represent the only library that survives from Greco-Roman antiquity. Many of the scrolls are too fragile to physically unroll and researchers have turned to digital-imaging techniques to reveal the contents of the papyri.
With the help of artificial intelligence and three college students from the United States, Switzerland, and Egypt, they accomplished what seemed impossible. The winning team was able to decipher part of an ancient Roman scroll that was buried during the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD using AI.
According to News Nation Now, more than 2,000 never-before-seen texts were decoded from the charred scroll. The text was Epicurean philosophy on music and food - how those two things pleased people.
"This represents a huge corpus of historical antiquities that if we could recover all of this ancient knowledge, it would almost double the amount of history that is recovered from ancient equities. I think that says a lot about the size of the challenge and the size of the potential that we can achieve by solving this," Vesuvius Challenge winning submission team lead Youssef Nader said.
The ancient Roman scrolls are in insubstantial form, but with the help of artificial intelligence, the program has trained itself to read the ink on both the surface and hidden layers.
As a result, the trio uncovered more than 15 columns of text, making up roughly 5% of one scroll.
"I believe that the goal is that we eventually have models that operate on any kind of scroll regardless of where it was stored, where it was buried, or what state it is in," Nader said.
The Vesuvius Challenge continues this year with a new grand prize. The goal is to read more scrolls using AI. The scroll that was only partially decoded is one of hundreds.
Scientific American says the achievement has brought the usually slow-moving world of ancient studies back to the forefront.
It's "what I always thought was a pipe dream coming true," says Kenneth Lapatin, curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, who was not involved in the contest. The revealed text discusses sources of pleasure, including music, the taste of capers, and the color purple. "It's a historic moment," says classicist Bob Fowler at the University of Bristol, UK, one of the prize judges.
Scientific American revealed the scroll is one of hundreds of intact papyri excavated in the eighteenth century from a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum, Italy. The lumps of carbonized ash, also known as Herculaneum scrolls, are the only library that survives from the ancient world.
In the centuries after the scrolls were discovered, many people attempted to unfold them but destroyed some during the process and leaving more in pieces.
A crucial development transpired in the middle of last year when U.S. entrepreneur and former physicist Casey Handmer noticed a barely there texture in the scans that he likened to cracked mud and called it "crackle." He realized the crackle formed the shapes of Greek letters.
WHAT'S NEXT IN STORE?
The results are "incredible," says Judge Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II. "We were all completely amazed by the images they were showing." She and her colleagues are now racing to analyze the text that has been revealed.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman, who had become intrigued by the Herculaneum scrolls, was the one who suggested opening the challenge to contestants. He donated $125,000 to launch the effort and raised hundreds of thousands more.
With the incredible success the challenge has brought, Friedman recently announced a new set of Vesuvius Challenge prizes for 2024, to read 85% of a scroll by the end of the year.
Talking more with the publication, he said getting this far "feels like a miracle. I can't believe it worked."
