Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

scrollprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 218 posts

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

#201

Post by araes »

gwern wrote: post #102
saled wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI it seems ChatGPT could have answered this for you. > The book you're describing sounds like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. In this near-future sci-fi novel, set in 2025, one of the subplots involves a project called the "Library Project," where the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library decides to digitize its entire collection. The process is somewhat as you described: books are destructively scanne…

I'm not surprised ChatGPT can answer it - I'm not sure why, but _Rainbows End_ is one of the most commonly-asked about SF books like that. Everyone remembers the book-tornado doing shotgun sequencing, but they can never remember its name or anything else that happens. I guess that's the problem with having a technology whose mental image is so compelling but also mostly disconnected to the rest of the book. (I know I…

Rainbow's End, and Vernor Vinge in general, probably also fall in that category of referenced often, yet not actually read. Somebody actually reads the book, finds the one cool quote or example everybody likes, that idea gets repeated a huge amount, and most people don't actually read Rainbows End. Yet you hear about it so much tangentially, you feel like you have (or must have).

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

#202

Post by qingcharles »

lynx23 wrote: post #166
qingcharles wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many things that look insane are becoming a reality. You look at those scrolls burnt to a crisp and the idea of reading them is nonsense. The fact I have a computer writing flowery alt text descriptions of my photos with unnerving accuracy is something I would not have predicted for another 20 years. But, here we are...

Kudos for caring about alt tags. Blind user here. While we are at it. I was also thinking how I could make good use of the new vision models. And after a while... https://github.com/mlang/tracktales The fact I have a computer generate spoken narration for my MPD playlist with descriptions of album art included just blows my mind. 2023 was indeed a fucking milestone.

That's awesome. GPT vision is unreal, to me. It's neat that you can finally get the computer to describe the album covers, something that no-one would have thought to bother with previously as it seems so trivial. A lot of album covers are surreal, so you're really going to put GPT to work there!

My grandma was blind, and I just spent 6 months looking after a guy who was blind (but has now had surgery and beat me in the eye test at the doctor's!), so I think about blindness a lot when I design.

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

#204

Post by verisimi »

namaria wrote: post #195
verisimi wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not say that in the article - this one and on a previous HN submission where I read about this. However, you are right - if you go to Tutorials and Scanning there is reference to the creation of a 'campfire scroll'. And now we have some detail..... and the detail is problematic. In tutorial 3, halfway down this page ( https://scrollprize.org/tutorial3 ) there is a before and after comparison of the scroll. Th…

I don't know man... implying people are publishing nonsense is what smacks the most here. If you think they are over fitting, show it, don't just air doubts idly.

I would post an image analysis - but the images on that site make it hard to compare before and after photos, not to mention that you can't post images here.

The before pic, needs to be flipped to compare to the after pic.

The before pic is not flat - it is taken on a curve. This makes it hard to use for comparisons.

The after pics are terrible quality.

As we are dealing with a long squiggle I can't describe it easily - people will be confused at what I am talking about.

However, once you get the images more or less in a comparable state, I can see things do no line up as you would expect. The first 'peak' points a different way. The lines do not line up. Stuff like that.

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

#205

Post by EnigmaFlare »

dekhn wrote: post #96

We truly live in a golden age of physical and mathematical discovery. To get here required many thousands of years of technological development. 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?

Why do you say thousands of years? Almost no technology was invented before the industrial revolution. But if you count those meagre dribbles, you might as well go back further and count pre-historic technology. I'd say pretty much all that stuff was trivial compared to what came after and humans spent most of their time working towards more zero-sum objectives than technology.

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

#206

Post by kristopolous »

bluGill wrote: post #190
kristopolous wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I doubt it. Most universities have some professor in this area and a few graduate students. There is very little else for them to read (the entire of all classic books we have fits on a shelf), and most of them can read the original language. They will read this as soon as it is available just because it they don't have much else to read that is a primary source material. Thus everything new is of great interest beca…

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered in the 1800s, has been fully digitized and experts expect it to take I think 150 additional years before they can all be read to the level of scholarship that's required

I found some conversation on the difficulty here https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/h...

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

#207

Post by linsomniac »

saled wrote: post #101
linsomniac wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FYI it seems ChatGPT could have answered this for you. > The book you're describing sounds like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. In this near-future sci-fi novel, set in 2025, one of the subplots involves a project called the "Library Project," where the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library decides to digitize its entire collection. The process is somewhat as you described: books are destructively scanne…

It wasn't able to for me, I put it into ChatGPT 4 before I posted this and it was pretty sure I was talking about Diamond Age, and then went on to floss me about how "literally shredding and scanning books isn't a part of the book, but it fits the vibe" (my summary of it's answer).

Thanks for reminding me about Rainbows End.

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

#208

Post by linsomniac »

linsomniac wrote: post #207
saled wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI it seems ChatGPT could have answered this for you. > The book you're describing sounds like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. In this near-future sci-fi novel, set in 2025, one of the subplots involves a project called the "Library Project," where the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library decides to digitize its entire collection. The process is somewhat as you described: books are destructively scanne…

It wasn't able to for me, I put it into ChatGPT 4 before I posted this and it was pretty sure I was talking about Diamond Age, and then went on to floss me about how "literally shredding and scanning books isn't a part of the book, but it fits the vibe" (my summary of it's answer). Thanks for reminding me about Rainbows End.

Aside: I remembered search history so I went over to make sure it was in Chat GPT and not Perplexity, but I've looked at both of those and can't seem to find a record of asking either one about shredding and scanning books. I could have sworn it was GPT 4. Now I wish I could find out. I did just ask Bard and it provided a list that included The Diamond Age, but did not include Rainbows End, though I'm quite sure that isn't where I looked before.

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

#209

Post by linsomniac »

gwern wrote: post #102
saled wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI it seems ChatGPT could have answered this for you. > The book you're describing sounds like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge. In this near-future sci-fi novel, set in 2025, one of the subplots involves a project called the "Library Project," where the UCSD (University of California, San Diego) library decides to digitize its entire collection. The process is somewhat as you described: books are destructively scanne…

I'm not surprised ChatGPT can answer it - I'm not sure why, but _Rainbows End_ is one of the most commonly-asked about SF books like that. Everyone remembers the book-tornado doing shotgun sequencing, but they can never remember its name or anything else that happens. I guess that's the problem with having a technology whose mental image is so compelling but also mostly disconnected to the rest of the book. (I know I…

I'm definitely in that camp, I read it ~10 years ago, and honestly can't remember anything about it but the book scanning.

Similarly, a friend recently read Ghost Fleet and I decided to pick it up and read it. The first chapter seemed familiar, and every once in a while there were "scenes" that I absolutely remembered having read years prior, but I had no memory of the overall plot.

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

#210

Post by namaria »

verisimi wrote: post #204
namaria wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man... implying people are publishing nonsense is what smacks the most here. If you think they are over fitting, show it, don't just air doubts idly.

I would post an image analysis - but the images on that site make it hard to compare before and after photos, not to mention that you can't post images here. The before pic, needs to be flipped to compare to the after pic. The before pic is not flat - it is taken on a curve. This makes it hard to use for comparisons. The after pics are terrible quality. As we are dealing with a long squiggle I can't describe it easil…

The raw images are available on gh. I'm sure as a hn user you can figure out how to stand up a website to show how they are wrong. Good luck!
Post reply on HN