The Vesuvius Challenge • Hacker News Board

Re: The Vesuvius Challenge

#31

Post by anshumankmr » Mon, Mar 27, 2023, 6:01 PM UTC

calderknight wrote: post #5

Some background: >if read, [the scrolls] would more than double the corpus of literature we have from antiquity And that's just with the ~600 scrolls that have been excavated so far: >excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground And, as for the content of the scrolls: >[at least some of the scrolls] contain philosophical texts written in Greek

>>[at least some of the scrolls] contain philosophical texts written in Greek

Let's not get our hopes too high. It could be something really mundane (for the time) but as they say "One man's trash is another man's treasure".

The ability to read such a thing is probably going to be the most invaluable part of this.

Re: The Vesuvius Challenge

#32

Post by seizethecheese » Mon, Mar 27, 2023, 6:48 PM UTC

HEmanZ wrote: post #24

rhodorhoades wrote: post #14

Earlier 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.

On the other hand, we still only have four out of the eight books of Epictetus’ discourses. (He’s another stoic philosopher and his discourses had a similar impact on me as meditations had on you.) This seems to refute the strong version of your argument.

Re: The Vesuvius Challenge

#33

Post by janpaul123 » Mon, Mar 27, 2023, 9:42 PM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #3

Anyone 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.

Anything you would like to share? Those hundreds of sheets would be useful for the community, and would be eligible for a $2000 open source prize.

Or if you'd like to tell us what you did in private, we'd appreciate that too. team [at] scrollprize [dot] org.