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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

#211

Post by bluGill »

kristopolous wrote: post #206
bluGill wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks for the link. However the problems there do not seem to apply here. There the problem seems to be lots of little fragments that need to be fit together to figure out the scroll. Here the scrolls are complete in one piece, so we have a much better idea of how the parts fit together (not perfect since this is layers that have to be combined, but close). There just getting the text is hard, here we mostly have the text (though we will need to error correct, they are at least readable)

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

#212

Post by gwern »

jacquesm wrote: post #130
gwern wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epicureans were atomists ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Physics ), so if you explained it to him, he might not be nearly as shocked as most people of the era would be. Epicureans also tended to invoke extremely insubstantial 'images' composed of especially tiny gossamer arrangements of atoms as explanations for things like dreams, and you can see how well that would work as an analogy with using X-rays…

It's a testimony to the power of mind equivalent to Einstein's 'Gedankenexperimenten'. The only reason they got some of it totally wrong is because they lacked the scientific apparatus to test their hypothesis, but they were on the right track.

Eh. The Epicurean arguments are heavily empirical; Lucretius throws in a lot of examples or familiar observations. I'm not sure how many I would describe as purely 'thought experiments'.

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

#213

Post by jobs_throwaway »

varjag wrote: post #162
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG compensation range but no benefits and 100x the risk Make it $8m or $12m and FAANG employees can actually start to justify working on it seriously from a money perspective

Most of them are not good enough to make a dent in this task.

Certainly. But you only need a few that are good enough to make a huge difference

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

#214

Post by sbierwagen »

s0rce wrote: post #116
Animats wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Now it can be done, but costs too much. Once they get a scanning unit near the scrolls, it will be much cheaper. The data reduction will probably get cheaper, too.

Scanning unit? Seems like the scanning was done using a synchrotron beamline. Maybe there is a suitable beamline at Elettra. I haven't looked closely why the synchrotron is needed. A Sigray instrument might work here, or even something simpler.

Vesuvius Challenge used the DLS I12 "High resolution imaging camera" mode: https://www.diamond.ac.uk/Instruments/Imaging-and-Microscopy... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I6JNrR6A9pMdANbn6uAuXbcDNwj...

The 2019 scans were done at 7.91 micrometer resolution with 88KeV monochromatic x-rays. Synchrotrons like DLS can also use their uniquely coherent x-rays to do diffraction imaging but I see no evidence they've tried that with Vesuvius scrolls. (Because the object is too thick?)

That scan is 5.5 terabytes of .tif files. The 2023 scan apparently is at 3.24 micrometer resolution and four separate scans of 53/70/88/105KeV each, which should produce a vast, data processing-chokingly wad of data. If all x thousand scrolls need to be scanned at that detail then the Vesuvius Challenge people are going to be juggling a lot of hard drives.

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

#215

Post by varjag »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #213
varjag wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them are not good enough to make a dent in this task.

Certainly. But you only need a few that are good enough to make a huge difference

Problem is determining which candidates who were preselected for cramming Leetcode for comp are actually any good. Can't see how going for handsomely paid tech folks is any better than enthusiasts from academia.

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

#216

Post by ahazred8ta »

Vespasian wrote: post #163
hnfong wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the quartz sand metaphor was to illustrate how advanced our silicon-based technology has become, not just the ML parts. Imagine all the stuff... transistors, Turing/Von Neumann machines, lithography, theoretical computer science, OS and compilers, the Internet... and lastly there's modern day machine learning that builds on top of all the above. The base level stuff isn't exactly protons and electrons, but gi…

The basic of concept how such a thing is powered (electricity) is so far removed from anything people did in ancient times that it would be hard to get them to understand that neither gods nor magic are invovled. Smart "intellectual" people would certainly be willing to challenge basically everything they assume about nature, but I don't think your run of the mill farmer would be able to do that.

It's simple, really; we flatten the rock, write on it with fire and acid, put lightning inside it, teach it many things, and make it speak to us from afar. See? No magic at all.

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

#217

Post by jacquesm »

gwern wrote: post #212
jacquesm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a testimony to the power of mind equivalent to Einstein's 'Gedankenexperimenten'. The only reason they got some of it totally wrong is because they lacked the scientific apparatus to test their hypothesis, but they were on the right track.

Eh. The Epicurean arguments are heavily empirical; Lucretius throws in a lot of examples or familiar observations. I'm not sure how many I would describe as purely 'thought experiments'.

In the case of atoms I think it's pretty clear that they lacked direct proof, they only had indirect ways of experimentation and I think to be able to reason about the 'indivisible' at a time when nothing that you could physically look at (this was well before microscopes) was indivisible is more of a mental than an empirical thing.

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

#218

Post by jobs_throwaway »

varjag wrote: post #215
jobs_throwaway wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly. But you only need a few that are good enough to make a huge difference

Problem is determining which candidates who were preselected for cramming Leetcode for comp are actually any good. Can't see how going for handsomely paid tech folks is any better than enthusiasts from academia.

That's what the contest is for. There's no screening other than by results
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