Hi folks, I'm the co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. We now have nearly $1.5M in prizes, thanks to a lot of amazing sponsors. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
The Vesuvius Challenge
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#22Anyone got any preliminary results to show? I was playing around with it and was doing pretty well with the unrolling step - I could get hundreds of sheets out mostly hole free.
You can see some very promising ink detection results here: https://scrollprize.org/tutorial4
And in this recent paper: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/educelab/EduceLab-Scrolls/...
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#23Hi folks, I'm the co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. We now have nearly $1.5M in prizes, thanks to a lot of amazing sponsors. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
One of the worries I have is that the grand prize is so top weighted. It feels daunting to want to attempt to work on something like this if there's only one winner. If my team isn't the first to win it, but we contribute an interesting method, the most we can get is a 2000$ open source prize?
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#24Can't wait for those scrolls to be readable. There's potentially so many scrolls still buried. With a bit of luck we will get complete versions of lost works from the ancient world.
Sometimes the works we do have from the ancient world seem…. Better? Like meditations is still the only ‘self-help’ book I’ve ever read that has actually made me a better person. I find the stoic philosophy so powerful, and every incarnation of philosophers afterwards are generally… pessimistic or cold and calculating?
Probably a selection bias, most (all?) ancient works we have were copied by hand (expensive!) and widely circulated enough for us to still have them. So we still have Marcus Aurelius but not Caesars poetry.
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#25Hi folks, I'm the co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. We now have nearly $1.5M in prizes, thanks to a lot of amazing sponsors. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
One of the worries I have is that the grand prize is so top weighted. It feels daunting to want to attempt to work on something like this if there's only one winner. If my team isn't the first to win it, but we contribute an interesting method, the most we can get is a 2000$ open source prize?
We're thinking about this too. The overall prize pool was about 6x smaller a week ago so we are still digesting this rapid influx of sponsorship.
The grand prize goes to the _first_ team to read 4 passages from the scrolls. But we could, for example, award something to the second team to do so. Or, we could award something to the team that reads the _most_ passages by the end of the year.
We deliberately did not allocate all of the recent sponsorships to the grand prize so we can solve for this exact challenge. So, we have about $500k in unallocated prize money, and might use a good chunk of it towards something like this. We're open to ideas, and consulting with experts from Xprize etc.
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#26I do worry the problem is insufficient data. What other scanning techniques are there? Does PET and MRI or work on these things? Is there any way to dope the structure to make the ink more visible? Something akin to immunocytochemistry marking via looking for chemical markers? Given the amount of innovation in immunocytochemistry binding methods, why couldn't they do something here for the ink?
We think there's enough data.
There is a multi-century history of chemical methods destroying scrolls by the hundreds without reading them, so we're not eager to fund that work.
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#27Hi folks, I'm the co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. We now have nearly $1.5M in prizes, thanks to a lot of amazing sponsors. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
Will all future scans of the papyrii be uploaded for anyone to analyse?
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes the works we do have from the ancient world seem…. Better? Like meditations is still the only ‘self-help’ book I’ve ever read that has actually made me a better person. I find the stoic philosophy so powerful, and every incarnation of philosophers afterwards are generally… pessimistic or cold and calculating?
Probably a selection bias, most (all?) ancient works we have were copied by hand (expensive!) and widely circulated enough for us to still have them. So we still have Marcus Aurelius but not Caesars poetry.
This is definitely the case. Most ancient texts were not lost in the burning of Alexandria or whatever, but simply decayed. The texts have to be actively copied to be preserved, and there was not the money to do this continuously over 2000 years. So only documents that the rich of times considered most important to be preserved were copied.
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#29I've been checking in on the Herculaneum scrolls every few months for years to see if any progress has been made reading them yet, so to see such a well orchestrated competition around them is really exciting!
Re: The Vesuvius Challenge
#30I do worry the problem is insufficient data. What other scanning techniques are there? Does PET and MRI or work on these things? Is there any way to dope the structure to make the ink more visible? Something akin to immunocytochemistry marking via looking for chemical markers? Given the amount of innovation in immunocytochemistry binding methods, why couldn't they do something here for the ink?
The science of archeology is a destructive one. Temples and tombs escavated in the late 1800’s could have largely benefitted from the rigour and advances made in modern archeology. How much information and narrative are lost to time due to their archeological mistakes? The same applies here. Experimenting with chemistry at all runs the risk of destroying the information forever. During these tests, the artifact must…
I'll bite.
> If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?
Yes.