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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

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Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#31

Post by bee_rider »

clawoo wrote: post #27
codeulike wrote: post #18

Over 2000 years ago a chap called Philodemus sits in the library of a luxurious villa owned by a rich guy who likes collecting art and writing. He writes his thoughts on pleasure, and the relationship between the quantity of something and the pleasure that might derive from it. The scroll goes on the shelves with the others. He writes lots. At some point later the villa is covered by lava from mt vesuvius. 2000 years…

I have too wild imagination sometimes. I picture him with a shocked look on his face, similar to what one of the modern 'thinkers' would have if they forgot to clear their browser history and somehow someone restored it in the future. "You recovered... uh... everything?"

That recovery is much easier though, it is using the device as intended.

And of course, rm just unlinks, doesn’t actually delete, so even going a step further and recovering deleted content is hardly magic.

This is more like if, sometime in the future, they somehow successfully reconstructed a snapshot of our computers’ volatile memory by examining the power supply, or something ridiculous like that.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#32

Post by bee_rider »

dougmwne wrote: post #24
alach11 wrote: post #4

This is the coolest thing I've read this year. It reads like science fiction. Who would even imagine it's possible to read text from a 2000 year-old rolled up burnt-crisp paper?

It’s a 270 year archaeological and technological culmination. The scrolls were dug up in 1752. It took the collective developments of the Industrial Revolution, the sciences all our engineering and manufacturing prowess to discover, preserve and scan the scrolls. Then the final cherry on top of the current AI revolution that can create inferences and connections that are beyond the human mind to even understand. And…

It is a bit fitting that it turns out the scroll is about the relationship between enjoyment and abundance.

It looks like, from what we can gather, the author decides that should something be hard to get, that doesn’t lead to greater enjoyment. But, it seems that the archaeologists have found an awful lot of joy in how “rare” access to these scrolls is!

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#33

Post by tobinfricke »

bglazer wrote: post #8

One aspect of archaeology that I really find fascinating is the practice of leaving certain artifacts unexplored. The original discoverers of the scrolls tried to unroll a few, apparently found it was impossible without completely destroying the scroll, and then just left the rest undisturbed. Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything, they left these as a mystery for a future age. Two centuries (!!) late…

Similarly, there are large sections of Pompeii, which remain unexcavated -- left for the future.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#35

Post by ImageXav »

I was ridiculously excited when I first read about this in October (if I remember correctly) last year, when a few of the first results were beginning to pop out. I found the methodology fascinating. First of all the digital unwrapping of the scrolls, then the recognition that crackling in the paper was the sign of ink, and finally putting together a model to detect it, piece by piece. I need to look into the final repository to understand what exactly they did, but they seem to have used a TimeSFormer. I'm confused by this choice as I thought it was for video. How did they apply this to images? In the end though, what a wonderful day for archeology. These young minds deserve a huge round of applause for what they have achieved.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#37

Post by iandanforth »

I was recently reading the Greek Myths series by Stephen Fry and he makes a point of how there are so many stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts. Stories and authors that were famous enough to be mentioned by multiple other authors but which themselves have been lost. This collection of scrolls could contain some of those lost stories and the possibility of that is terribly exciting.

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#39

Post by yieldcrv »

tl;dr

The general subject of the text is pleasure, which, properly understood, is the highest good in Epicurean philosophy. In these two snippets from two consecutive columns of the scroll, the author is concerned with whether and how the availability of goods, such as food, can affect the pleasure which they provide. Do things that are available in lesser quantities afford more pleasure than those available in abundance? Our author thinks not: “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.” However, is it easier for us naturally to do without things that are plentiful? “Such questions will be considered frequently.”

Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

#40

Post by klyrs »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #13
bglazer wrote: post #8

One aspect of archaeology that I really find fascinating is the practice of leaving certain artifacts unexplored. The original discoverers of the scrolls tried to unroll a few, apparently found it was impossible without completely destroying the scroll, and then just left the rest undisturbed. Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything, they left these as a mystery for a future age. Two centuries (!!) late…

> Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything In the early days they wouldn't have accomplished anything by pushing forward, so it doesn't take all that much restraint. I'm more impressed by people in, say, the 1990s or early 2000s. They might've had a shot but there was still too much risk, so they restrained themselves until it was a safer bet.

On the other hand, we ground up mummies for paint to the point that we ran out and used fresher corpses to meet demand.

It is a bit of miracle that they were preserved, and not just discarded.

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