I could help but wonder while reading this how everyone involved would feel if the "last step" involving the papyrologists was automated as well.
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
141–150 of 218 posts
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I am going for cryopreservation if I ever have the luxury of choosing the way I die.
Well, that could go lots of ways. Maybe some rich trillionaire buys you and spawns you into an endless horror simulation. They might be into torture and get off on it. ("No real humans harmed.") But if the future can reverse the light cone, nobody is immune to that fate. Who knows what the future holds. These are just sci-fi flights of fancy.
I remember learning about ancestor simulations by the vile offspring in accelerando, but reversing the light cone is quite chilling - is there any sci-fi novel that deals with that you would recommend?
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#143Even if I really do think this is an amazing effort, I'll spoil the techno-optimist party here by noting that's a bit sad that this kind of achievements are pulled off only by rich patrons that became millionaires doing another unrelated thing and they just want to scratch a personal itch/curiosity. Yeah, patrons and maecenas have been around forever, but I would really prefer that we as society were mature enough to achieve such things collectively. We did it, at least for a few decades and even if coming from wrong incentives, with space exploration.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#144Apparntly 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…
I realize citing Wikipedia risks some serious error, but my impression is that by late antiquity (after AD 200), the main philosophical systems in the Roman world were Christianity and Neoplatonism (itself heavily influenced by Christianity) and to a lesser extent Stoicism. Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Middle Platonism were more characteristic of Classical Antiquity (200 BC-200 AD). The Wikipedia page on Epicureanism[0] supports this impression: "By the late third century CE, however, there was little trace of its existence.[7] With growing dominance of Neoplatonism and Peripateticism, and later, Christianity, Epicureanism declined."
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#145I could help but wonder while reading this how everyone involved would feel if the "last step" involving the papyrologists was automated as well.
Amazing? As whomever made it would have likely created an incredibly powerful generally useful tool. That would be much more exciting than probabilistically distinguishing layers of ink in soot.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#146I 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.
>stories we know of but have been lost from ancient texts So many there's a lengthy list on Wikipedia about it. It's fascinating reading ancients casually referencing works that we otherwise know nothing else about. Without the careful, laborious copying (often imperfect) over the centuries most things would've been lost completely. There's also other works such as maps that did not survive, the Tabula Peutingeriana…
Seutonius' Lives of Famous Whores is a lost text I've always hoped we would recover at some point.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#147Herculaneum was one of the highlights of my trip to Italy with the wife. I didn't realize the scope of just how much ash and soil had to be removed for excavation. It was dozens of meters [1]. It's an absolute shame that the site is given a fraction of the attention that Pompeii receives, I thought it was vastly better preserved and truly awe-inspiring [2]. I highly recommend spending a few hours wandering the site,…
I enjoyed the attention given to Herculaneum in a computer game called Rome: Pathway to Power (released in 1992). You start the game as a slave who has to escape Herculaneum before Vesuvius erupts. I loved the game as a kid. It's sort of like an isometric immersive sim (with a clunky interface). It got me interested in ancient Rome.
I hope to visit Herculaneum some day.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's all about incentives. $1 million is a lot of money. The vast majority of hard problems don't have much brainpower dedicated to them, because the bang/buck ratio doesn't work out. Machine learning, math, and adjacent fields already have many careers that pay very well, so getting top-notch experts to dedicate their attention to what might be a futile endeavor is difficult. And this isn't only about the monetary v…
Not to be argumentative, but $1M isn’t very much money, certainly not for a project of this scope. It’s a testament to the creativity, competence, and dedication of those involved they’ve gotten this far with such little funding. Hopefully their early success will attract more resources to this very worthy project.
I think most of all this is a testament to just how much raw talent and intellectual potential is locked up in the winner-takes-all dynamics and shortsightedness of the stock market. Imagine the exploits and results in a world where everyone had the baseline resources and opportunities for extra funding for pursuing niche interests.
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wild, isn't it? Hands down my favorite historical fact learned in 2023. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
Wild? Wait until you read about people actually eating mummies and corpses https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...
The things Futurama made me look up on Wikipedia...
Re: Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
#150I 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 r…
my understanding is that the scan they did on the scrolls returned the layers themselves. Like so:
```
xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
...
xxxxxxxxxx ```
So, by tiling the image on the surface you get data that is size_x * size_y * n_layers. So, it can be seen as a video stream with size_x * size_y * 1 channel * n_layers where the layers replace the temporal dimension.