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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

scrollprize.org

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

#161

Post by verditelabs »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #154
verditelabs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You brought up what I'm most curious about: Where does the ground truth come from for this work since you can't just to unwrap a scroll to tell if the model got it right or, presumably, make a facsimile scroll and wrap it up.

The ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of the scroll that are preserved well, but is extremely tedious and slow and error prone. We have a team of annotators who do manual annotation and refinement through custom software we've written, mostly improving on automatically generated segmentations and unwrappings.

Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.

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

#162

Post by thatoneengineer »

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.

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?

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

#163

Post by verditelabs »

arikrahman wrote: post #70
verditelabs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well what were your first thoughts when you decoded the script, besides the obvious Eureka, after making some sense of the texts?

Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.

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

#164

Post by charcircuit »

kridsdale3 wrote: post #74
charcircuit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After sticking it into CharGPT I can tell you it's neither. The word upmost is coming from is a form of the compound verb ἐκπονέω. * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end” * πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”

I trust a lifelong dedicated Ancient Greek Papyrologist to do a better job here than ChatGPT.

And I don't. Humans are notoriously subjective / opinionated in the translations they make.

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

#166

Post by seizethecheese »

empath75 wrote: post #137
seizethecheese wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think. Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.

I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.

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

#167

Post by verditelabs »

thatoneengineer wrote: post #162
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.

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?

Beats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist.

Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

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

#168

Post by postalrat »

sevenzero wrote: post #48
lanthissa wrote: post #46

The person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.

>technology that build the pyramids You mean ropes and carts?

How did nvidia make their most powerful GPUs in 2026? You mean sand and metal?

How does ASML make the most modern chips? You mean light and mirrors?

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

#170

Post by itsthecourier »

verditelabs wrote: post #133
negergreger wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How fast is the process? Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?

We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.

may you please tell us how much effort goes into each type of task in those months?

where else do you think these techniques be applied?

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