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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

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Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#101

Post by inglor_cz »

vitally3643 wrote: post #86
inglor_cz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.

I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience. Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.

Can experimental archaeology actually replicate this? If not, I don't find the speculation, even though logical, to be conclusive.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#103

Post by verditelabs »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #94
verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount? have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?

30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.

The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.

The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#104

Post by normie3000 »

empath75 wrote: post #99
bambax wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts. It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again o…

I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most int…

> we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them

So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#106

Post by seizethecheese »

empath75 wrote: post #99
bambax wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts. It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again o…

I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most int…

Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#107

Post by dgellow »

dylan604 wrote: post #31
clickety_clack wrote: post #16

When 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.

Sending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I'd have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA

You might want to read this: https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#108

Post by dgellow »

inglor_cz wrote: post #101
vitally3643 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience. Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.

Can experimental archaeology actually replicate this? If not, I don't find the speculation, even though logical, to be conclusive.

Yes

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#109

Post by gekoxyz »

verditelabs wrote: post #95
2ap wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?

I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of goo…

> it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is.

Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#110

Post by rossdavidh »

verditelabs wrote: post #95
2ap wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?

I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of goo…

That is a general truth of most ML; many models _can_ find the information in the data, if the data is good enough. If it is not, then likely no model can.
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