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

First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 95 posts

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#51

Post by coffeebeqn »

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.

Things like OCR or detection ML models don’t generally have the same drawbacks / hallucinations as LLMs for example. They’re not 100% accurate but they also won’t return made up results. Detecting a pattern is very different from any kind of “reasoning”

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#52

Post by ctrlp »

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…

Very clever

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#53

Post by bboygravity »

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…

So you're saying the kid who digitally unwraps Vesivius scrolls is not smart enough to write automated systems to detect that Covid payments to literal

"Free money LLC"

are likely fraudulent?

Just to name an example.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#54

Post by MadnessASAP »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #26
gkbrk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

College kids can be scientists. Anyone doing science is a scientist. There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for Citizen Science. We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can discover.

Exactly. Science is a process not an ideology.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing things down. - Abraham Lincoln (probably)

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#55

Post by t_mann »

baruz wrote: post #38

They said that the work was a Greek Epicurean work, but described it as finding fulfillment in the pleasures of life. The Greek Epicureans were of the opinion that avoiding pain and suffering was the object of ethical philosophy, which is not the same thing, at all.

> Epicureanism ... declares pleasure to be its sole intrinsic goal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism

What the OP actually says is 'fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things' which is very much in line with Epicurean thinking.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#56

Post by ben_w »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #51
mmooss wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Things like OCR or detection ML models don’t generally have the same drawbacks / hallucinations as LLMs for example. They’re not 100% accurate but they also won’t return made up results. Detecting a pattern is very different from any kind of “reasoning”

Two things:

1. OCR absolutely does "hallucinate", and the word better suits that domain of OCR than the domain of LLMs as OCR will sometimes "see" text that doesn't actually exist.

2. This isn't OCR, it's more like contrast enhancement on a CT scan. Looking at a the project website, there's other work to figure out the shape of the paper surface because that's not obvious or simple either.

The output of this model is what might be given to an OCR, but given how noisy the picture in the article is, I suspect not.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#57

Post by ben_w »

bboygravity wrote: post #53
mattigames wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So you're saying the kid who digitally unwraps Vesivius scrolls is not smart enough to write automated systems to detect that Covid payments to literal "Free money LLC" are likely fraudulent? Just to name an example.

Without comment on the guy himself — I assume he's enthusiastically trying to do the best for the world, like most people — there's a huge gap between "let's find and stop very obvious fraud" and "let's cancel all soft power spending everywhere immediately because I don't know what value it has and don't want to spend money for the time it takes to find out".

The former is police work.

The latter is a practical demonstration of Chesterton's Fence, which is the "conservative" part of the word "conservative".

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#58

Post by ben_w »

dmolony wrote: post #31

Luckily they explained what papyrus is. The BBC is now doing ELI5.

You say that like 6 year olds regularly use papyrus.

Despite that it was once common, very few people today have any more reason to know about it than they have to know about silphium or electrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrum

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#59

Post by luma »

omoikane wrote: post #41
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...

They also created their own scroll, cooked it, and scanned it to create a ground truth dataset.

Re: First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

#60

Post by teleforce »

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…

I think this is where most of the ML/AI practitioners need to focus on.

Instead of obsessing over other accuracy technique for fully autonomous detection they should focus on human assisted detection to improve the quality/value of the solution. In this case recall/sensitivity is the utmost important accuracy metric and try to get it closer to 100% if possible. Hence even if the ML/AI got it wrong (due to false positive detection), at least the human experts can have a look at it and hopefully eliminate any false positive. It also considerably reduce the burden of the upstream manual based inspection/automation since it is machine automated. This can also mitigate and hopefully prevent false negative detection because false negative detection will not has the opportunity for further inspection/verification by the human experts or trained inspectors. Essentially the AI/ML is functioning as the filter shifting through the massive data very quickly (with minimum or zero false negative), and then the results are then verified by the much slower human experts.

Post reply on HN