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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

#221

Post by stringfood »

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…

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent

No, because reality is always stranger than fiction

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

#223

Post by lisper »

codeulike wrote: post #198
quotemstr wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> 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

Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.

> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.

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

#225

Post by Nition »

mattbettinson wrote: post #53

I wonder what the parellel would be 2,000 years for now: A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded

Discs of this era are frequently marked with a specific, unknown sequence of symbols: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. Archaelogists believe it may have religious significance.

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

#226

Post by selcuka »

mc32 wrote: post #60
cwnyth wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all machine learning is generative AI.

True but like regular document scanning software there can be errors in detection.

Yeah. There was a weird Xerox printer bug that swapped digits (turning 6s into 8s) on scanned documents caused by the JBIG2 image format [1].

[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

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

#227

Post by arcticfox »

lisper wrote: post #223
codeulike wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> 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 Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago. > could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us? It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would h…

I think the primary reason why our reality has quickly surpassed a bulk of earlier sci-fi is that sci-fi starts to become less interesting on average as AIs/robots start to dominate the frontier of everything.

It's "progress" but it's...not interesting except at the beginning of the threshold, when AIs overtake humanity. In many sci-fi stories that's a dominant theme, but it's not likely to be a long epoch in reality IMO, based on the very brief periods when machines/AIs have overtaken humans in individual domains (arithmetic, chess, Go, coding, translation, CGI, etc).

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

#228

Post by dev1ycan »

This is so beautiful in a way, like going back in time and saving someone from dying, their words are now back into history.

In a way this is sort of like the reverse of a recently aired anime (Orb: on the movements of the Earth) which talk about the opposite, people whose contributions were erased and we'll never know about them.

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

#230

Post by junon »

verditelabs wrote: post #59
superjan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we known what ink is used?

Most of the evidence so far points towards carbon based ink. I am not sure if any of the scrolls we have scanned show strong evidence of iron gall based ink. I know that there are different types and preparation methods for different carbon based inks, but I do not know if it is possible to determine which kind(s) were used solely from inspecting the xrays. I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making,…

Thanks for answering all the questions in here. Fascinating work.
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