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First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

bbc.co.uk

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Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#41

Post by omoikane »

mmooss wrote: post #37

How do we know the AI output is accurate? What observable evidence is there? From the article: > Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ... > The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have t…

> How do we know the AI output is accurate?

From the blog post where they announced 2023 grand prize: they did a couple of things to verify the results, including scanning the same area multiple times and making sure that multiple models produce similar results.

https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#42

Post by [deleted] »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #24
Erwin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That CS student was Luke Farritor -- now part of the infamous DOGE team.

I get the ideologues here being mad… but I don’t get mad to the point where people need to pretend this guy isn’t highly intelligent. Doesn’t it make it better that there are really sharp people on the “DOGE” team. Shouldn’t people be more mad at dummies doing it?

[deleted]

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#43

Post by tasty_freeze »

generalizations wrote: post #35
xhevahir wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that smart people are involved if we take it at face value that they're trying increase "government efficiency," as opposed to, say, dismantling the welfare and regulatory state; if the latter are their aim, and if we don't want them to accomplish such a goal, we should not be cheered to learn that they're such clever lads.

> dismantling the welfare and regulatory state Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.

Trump won by a very small margin, 1.5%, and didn't even get 50% of the popular vote. It isn't a "landslide" or "mandate" no matter how many times they claim it. Yes, Trump won, but that isn't grounds for ignoring the constitution. There is a separation of powers and Trump can't delegate powers which aren't his to Musk to delegate to technoboys.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#44

Post by seanmcdirmid »

generalizations wrote: post #35
xhevahir wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that smart people are involved if we take it at face value that they're trying increase "government efficiency," as opposed to, say, dismantling the welfare and regulatory state; if the latter are their aim, and if we don't want them to accomplish such a goal, we should not be cheered to learn that they're such clever lads.

> dismantling the welfare and regulatory state Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.

That's what 49.8% of the voters voted for. So not really "most" for any reasonable meaning of the term "most".

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#45

Post by mattigames »

mattigames wrote: post #30
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Is the guy suddenly not sharp and talented anymore?

It's likely that the talents needed to solve a technical challenge such as finding text in CT scans of heavily burned pages using machine learning doesn't mean he will have the same level of success when dealing with insights about socioeconomic issues in both the local and global scale and all the politics that such endeavor needs, specially when there is a heavy bias to an existing decision, the decision to reduce…

Just the cutting of everything USAID shows how little he understands of politics, the soft power that such organization earns for the country cannot be overstated, but in the business context Musk knows best there is really not equivalent, so he thinks such spending counts as "inefficiency", turns out countries are not companies and Musk and friends are in for a rude awakening and the country is the one who will suffer because of it as it increasingly alienates it's allies.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#46

Post by mmooss »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #40
mmooss wrote: post #37

How do we know the AI output is accurate? What observable evidence is there? From the article: > Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ... > The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have t…

The ML ink-detection models aren't spitting out Greek text. They're just predicting ink locations, which can be calibrated and cross-checked by manual inspection with the original. (E.g., an earlier article showed how ink particles showed up as a shift in texture.) They operate on a lower level than letters and words, so if the ink does correspond to Greek letters that come out to recognizable Greek words forming sen…

> Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.

That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#47

Post by StableAlkyne »

mmooss wrote: post #46
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ML ink-detection models aren't spitting out Greek text. They're just predicting ink locations, which can be calibrated and cross-checked by manual inspection with the original. (E.g., an earlier article showed how ink particles showed up as a shift in texture.) They operate on a lower level than letters and words, so if the ink does correspond to Greek letters that come out to recognizable Greek words forming sen…

> Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors. That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.

> But in science we need observable evidence.

The observable evidence here is the raw x-ray data. Based on the article, what is being done here was using ML to process that X-ray data, to create another set of output that the humans could analyze.

I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon, but this ain't ChatGPT. Using ML to process complex instrument output has been used since at least the 70s. This is much closer to statistics based approaches than it is to some random startup trying to sell your manager on some snake oil AI-assisted whatever.

I don't know your background, so I'm sorry if I'm assuming anything. Any chance you articulate what specifically you don't like about the method they used to process the data, other than "It's ML?"

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#48

Post by LegionMammal978 »

mmooss wrote: post #46
LegionMammal978 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ML ink-detection models aren't spitting out Greek text. They're just predicting ink locations, which can be calibrated and cross-checked by manual inspection with the original. (E.g., an earlier article showed how ink particles showed up as a shift in texture.) They operate on a lower level than letters and words, so if the ink does correspond to Greek letters that come out to recognizable Greek words forming sen…

> Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors. That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.

We have plenty of observable evidence that the output of these detection models correponds to real ink residue, at least on one of the scrolls where the distinct texture is most obvious [0]. The models definitely aren't making things up out of pure noise.

And if they did, then it almost certainly wouldn't come out as identifiable Greek letters, since these models are strictly looking at local patches of texture to identify the presence or absence of ink. Again, these aren't just black boxes spitting out long passages of Greek text, everything past the initial ink detection is still done by hand.

[0] https://scrollprize.org/firstletters#caseys-crackle-pattern

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#49

Post by klipt »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #43
generalizations wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> dismantling the welfare and regulatory state Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.

Trump won by a very small margin, 1.5%, and didn't even get 50% of the popular vote. It isn't a "landslide" or "mandate" no matter how many times they claim it. Yes, Trump won, but that isn't grounds for ignoring the constitution. There is a separation of powers and Trump can't delegate powers which aren't his to Musk to delegate to technoboys.

Unfortunately the only leverage Congress has to stop Executive overreach is impeachment.

If they refuse to impeach, then they are tacitly handing the Executive ever more power, essentially moving us from a republic to an elected dictatorship.

And given that the GOP has a majority, no matter how slim, it seems very unlikely they will impeach.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#50

Post by decremental »

mattigames wrote: post #45
mattigames wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely that the talents needed to solve a technical challenge such as finding text in CT scans of heavily burned pages using machine learning doesn't mean he will have the same level of success when dealing with insights about socioeconomic issues in both the local and global scale and all the politics that such endeavor needs, specially when there is a heavy bias to an existing decision, the decision to reduce…

Just the cutting of everything USAID shows how little he understands of politics, the soft power that such organization earns for the country cannot be overstated, but in the business context Musk knows best there is really not equivalent, so he thinks such spending counts as "inefficiency", turns out countries are not companies and Musk and friends are in for a rude awakening and the country is the one who will suff…

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