For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research)
I'm kind of obsessed with the ancient world. I dream of being able to read entire pages of new text from ~2,000 years ago.
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
11–20 of 404 posts
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#12I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?
I am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I'm a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#13I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?
Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#14Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum. A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?
The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#15I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
Are the fragments destroyed in ‘69 and ‘80 available to be read similarly? Or were they disposed of?
I am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and/or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#16When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”.
How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#17Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.
Sure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.
Of course! But the title is misleading and gives people the impression that we don't already know the library is just full of Epicurean texts.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#18I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#19I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?
Probably a lot more texts of Epicurean philosophy and not a whole lot else unfortunately according to my papyrologist friend.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#20I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
Given the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?
That's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection.
For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.