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

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

scrollprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 404 posts

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

#191

Post by quotemstr »

codeulike wrote: post #173

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.

Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.

The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.

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

#194

Post by manbash »

verditelabs wrote: post #167
thatoneengineer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sorrow…

It's so humbling to realize that the human mind hasn't changed a lot. Only our environment.

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

#196

Post by lopsotronic »

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…

Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others.

And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.

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

#198

Post by codeulike »

quotemstr wrote: post #191
codeulike wrote: post #173

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus. Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviv…

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.

Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.

What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

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

#199

Post by londons_explore »

verditelabs wrote: post #152
amluto wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it? Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able t…

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink. A lot of…

I assume that's because the writer probably sometimes shortly after re-inking the writing instrument was putting down a 10x thicker layer...
Post reply on HN