91–100 of 218 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it will probably take years In the direction things are going ... maybe a few months :)
The biggest bottleneck is getting the experts to read it. You need a decade or so of graduate level education and interpreting things takes apparently quite a long time. Maybe that's another AI application.
Given that AI is able to hallucinate, how can we be convinced the results are accurate? Did they create a new scroll, burn it, and compare the results to what was actually written?
read the article
Technical reproduction. The Vesuvius Challenge Technical Review Team reproduced the winning submissions manually. We made sure to clearly understand every part of the code, and that when we run it independently we get similar output images. Since all code and training data is now open source, you can do the same!
Multiple submissions of the same area. You might have noticed that all submission images above show the same area of the scroll. This is because we released 3d-mapped papyrus sheets within the CT-scan (“segments”) created by our segmentation team, which were then used by all contestants. The resulting output images — created by different ML models and training labels — have produced extremely similar results. This holds not just for the winners and runner ups, but also for the other submissions that we received.
Small input/output windows. The ink detection models are not based on Greek letters, optical character recognition (OCR), or language models. Instead, they independently detect tiny spots of ink in the CT scan, the writing appearing later when these are aggregated. As a result, the text appearing in the images is not the imagined output of a machine learning model, but is instead directly tied to the underlying data in the CT scan.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?
Speaking of "reading like sci-fi", what's that book where they scan an entire library of books, descructively, by feeding them into a "book chipper" like device that chops the books up into little pieces, vacuums those pieces up and scans the pieces as they flow through, reconstructing the original text by putting the scanned results together like so many jigsaw puzzles? It was a subplot of the book, but I can't for…
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (ChatGPT helped with the search)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
read the article
Thanks. From the article, for anyone else skimming who had the same question: Technical reproduction. The Vesuvius Challenge Technical Review Team reproduced the winning submissions manually. We made sure to clearly understand every part of the code, and that when we run it independently we get similar output images. Since all code and training data is now open source, you can do the same! Multiple submissions of the…
Apparntly the bad news is that the remaining scrolls most likely contain yet more Epicurean philosophy, maybe largely from not-top-rated guys like Philodemus. (Apparently it's possible that the library actually is, or incorporates, Philodemus' personal library.) https://twitter.com/DrFrancisYoung/status/175453630645602754...
That's not necessarily bad news. Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve ( https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt ). It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura , which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world. In particular Lucretius and…
It's interesting reading for a layperson, but as with any other pop-history book, one should read this with a heaping plate of salt at hand. (I'm... not sure what that metaphor actually means or if this is an appropriate way to extend it.)
Things are always more nuanced than can be laid out in a sweeping narrative format and the compression required can lose some critical information, even with the best of intentions. There's also just getting things wrong, which most non-historians do and many historians will do on topics that aren't their expertise.
I'd read this criticism from AskHistorians (not infallible, I know)
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ejfxe5/comme...
The developers of the transformer, as a group, should win some sort of significant prize; it has had more impact in a short time than anything I've seen before. Will we find better architectures in the near future?
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.
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 highly recommend spending a few hours wandering the site, it is an absolute wonder.
1: https://www.icloud.com/photos/#08dJAA5eM9jpbhlEa3fzkl5ng 2: https://www.icloud.com/photos/#076Pof4FziA7WgcI8hZrGZmzg
I wonder what this means for the maya codices, many of which are in similar shape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices#Other_Maya_codice...