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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

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Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#11

Post by vimax »

Wojtkie wrote: post #7
chakintosh wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a customer complaint: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...

What I love about the Ea-Nasir story is the tablet was found in a pile of other tablets, suggesting that Ea-Nasir saved them. Why? Who knows, maybe he found them funny.

I heard somewhere it was common practice to reuse tablets. It was easier to scrape the surface clean than to make a new tablet.

You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean.

In Mesopotamia there was a period where it was fashionable to use a more rare softer red clay on top of the white clay. Your stylus would cut through the top layer leaving nice white letters on a red background. It made it easier to scrape clean and reuse, but much less durable over time.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#13

Post by nulbyte »

kelsey9876543 wrote: post #8

I recently saw a wonderful youtube video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_L1oN8y7Bs Title: Herculaneum scrolls: A 20-year journey to read the unreadable it goes a little bit into the technology of how this was done, deep learning finally cracked the code. They had the scans for a decade but it took ML training to be able to identify which parts were paper and which parts were the ink on top. This had been d…

Thank you for sharing. It's a month old, but even so, I just saw a pinned comment ppsted an hour ago about an announcement coming later today.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#14

Post by latchkey »

empath-nirvana wrote: post #10
sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 $700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start… It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

it might cost more than $700k in compute.

It certainly did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312385

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#15

Post by terhechte »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 $700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start… It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

This is one of more than 600 scrolls that could be read afterwards if the method becomes scalable. What's more: "excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground." [0]

[0]: https://scrollprize.org

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#16

Post by jdminhbg »

This is the 21st-century equivalent of living through the opening of Tut's tomb. Incredible to think there's a very real chance that in the medium-term future you might be able to buy a copy of a newly-translated work on Amazon that hasn't been read for millennia.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#17

Post by versteegen »

The lettering was found by looking for 'crackle' texture on papyrus segments from the CT scans which obviously were in the shape of Greek letters, and annotating those as training data. Unfortunately such crackle texture isn't visible, at least by eye, on most of the papyrus. Probably it's only that visible where the ink was very thick. You can easily see the difference in texture in this electron microscope image [1] (far higher resolution than the CT scans) but especially on the very edge of the inked area (the narrow strip in the left image; I think the whole right image is inked) where the ink was pushed to. I'm surprised the crackle was discovered only after the Kaggle Ink Detection contest. Looking at the CT-scanned fragments with infrared ground truths, which were used in the Kaggle contest, Casey Handmer wrote [2]:

> The ongoing apparent failure of deep-learning based ink detection based on the fragments indicated to me that direct inspection of the actual data would be more fruitful, as it has been here.

> ...

> I found similar “cracked mud” and “flake” textures corresponding to known character ink, but only for perhaps 10% of the known characters. It’s been a long day, I can probably find more on closer inspection, but that does make one wonder about automated ink detection and what that is seeing.

These new images are much better than I hoped for, but still only in one small area, so I'm still pessimistic about more than an odd sentence being readable.

[1] https://scrollprize.org/img/tutorials/sem.png

[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien...

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#18

Post by jdminhbg »

vimax wrote: post #11
Wojtkie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I love about the Ea-Nasir story is the tablet was found in a pile of other tablets, suggesting that Ea-Nasir saved them. Why? Who knows, maybe he found them funny.

I heard somewhere it was common practice to reuse tablets. It was easier to scrape the surface clean than to make a new tablet. You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean. In Mesopotamia there was a period where it was fashionable to use a more rare softer red clay on top of the white clay. Your stylus would cut through the top layer leaving nice white letters on a red backgr…

Yes, the clay tablets were used over and over. The ones that are preserved have what was written on them when they were fired, accidentally, by being in a building that was destroyed by fire.

Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

#19

Post by jdminhbg »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906 $700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start… It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

> It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

Most likely not, I believe they're starting with scrolls that were readable on the outside, which we know are minor works of Greek stoic philosophy. Also a laundry list would be written on a reusable wax tablet, rather than costly papyrus.

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