Are they controlling for this? How is the validation being done?
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
111–120 of 218 posts
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Demographics refutes your last point. By all means, please explain.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/07/why-peopl... .
>These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world’s population in 2060, down from roughly 16% as of 2015.
That's certainly a trend, but it's in relative terms, not absolute terms. The study also did not break the demographics down by religion, nor does it represent hegemony. They don't control the government or the educational institutions. Even further, the notion that religiosity in the West will be Christian is unproven.
Regardless, the kind of active suppression of contradictory evidence to religious narratives that was historically present from the early middle ages to the early modern period is no longer extant. The Church can put any discovered texts on a Novus Index Librorum Prohibitorum all they want, but that's not going to stop academia or the Internet from mining it.
Also, I can speak from personal experience with a traditionalist Catholic father, none of his many kids are Catholic. Having kids doesn't mean successfully keeping them religious.
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#113This might count as one of the most extreme stories of data recovery I've seen. I wonder if in another 2000 years we'll have a "first file discovered on discarded hard drive platter".
Reminds me faintly of this story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry#:~:text=MS%20... .
Quick aside: I know Chrome has supported the link-to-highlight for years now, but does anyone know where the "#:~:text=" hash format is documented at? Searching for that is really hard.
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me faintly of this story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry#:~:text=MS%20... .
Quick aside: I know Chrome has supported the link-to-highlight for years now, but does anyone know where the "#:~:text=" hash format is documented at? Searching for that is really hard.
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminds me faintly of this story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry#:~:text=MS%20... .
Quick aside: I know Chrome has supported the link-to-highlight for years now, but does anyone know where the "#:~:text=" hash format is documented at? Searching for that is really hard.
Here is a reference I found: https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096
It appears that it currently chrome only.
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#116I 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…
This is highly misleading. Deep learning was not what did the discovery, the find was handmade. They're trying to make a deep learning model do what was done by hand here, but so far they haven't had success in it finding actual letters.
These models certainly have found letters, although mostly they produce unreadable partial letters. Look at the images from the "What’s next?" section of the article! [1] They certainly seem better than human annotation, and more importantly don't hallucinate whole letters. Casey Handmer made a submission for this First Letters prize [2] based solely on hand-annotation and wasn't awarded it, because it's really unconvincing. His letters [3] don't look at all like the computer annotations.
[1] https://scrollprize.org/img/firstletters/youssef-new.png
[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien...
[3] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/C-vKV4SdsyH961w6KPwD6rypt0...
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quick aside: I know Chrome has supported the link-to-highlight for years now, but does anyone know where the "#:~:text=" hash format is documented at? Searching for that is really hard.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments
Thanks! This was my main curiosity: "[fragments] are stripped from the URL during loading so that author scripts cannot directly interact with them"
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/07/why-peopl... .
>These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world’s population in 2060, down from roughly 16% as of 2015. That's certainly a trend, but it's in relative terms, not absolute terms. The study also did not break the demographics down by religion, nor does it represent hegemony .…
The interesting thing about moving forward is we are entering the post truth era where technology can spoof and create an unlimited set of falsehoods.
Active information suppression in this era is mostly the work of governments and government aligned corporations.
Random question about the last point, did your upbringing involve nightly family prayer and thanksgiving? Or was the post war impact too great to maintain that tradition?
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#119The 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…
I actually participated in the challenge for a little while and this was the approach I took before I dropped out to do a few other things.
However, what I did was a bit different -- instead of looking for a crackle, I surmised that that 'crackling' effect actually is just of course slices of the data over different rifts in the parchment, and that the data of the ink lay on the manifold of that crackling and bending.
It would not be as clear to the human eye for all of the letters, I think, as there are many, many, many layers in the scanned image, and you can only start to see a pattern emerge over time as you cycle through the images.
I was working on code that minimized an optimization function that was basically the total variance loss if I recall correctly, where it just interpolated each pixel column up and down bilinearly to 'align' the blocks of the image so that the crackle texture was flattened.
From there I planned on using a rather optimized convolutional network on the 'flattened' image, which can I think be done rather efficiently as if you look at a cross section of the scroll you can see where it's like a tree in that the pinching and such seems to be somewhat locally consistent, so you might be able to get away with some interpolation.
I should probably share the code if this is of interest to anyone, since I'm not pursuing the competition at the moment.
Also, this is why I did not buy into 3D convolutions for this, at least. Ink that has been laid and dried should follow a semi-predictable pattern that a 2D convolution can detect, I do not know if a 3D convolution really brings us anything, as the invariances we desire can be structured up front more easily.
If there is interest in the code, let me know and I can do a little digging, otherwise, it is a fun challenge, for sure.
Re: First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
#120On a side note iirc there were also some Dead Sea scrolls that were hard to open, were they able to open and read all of the scrolls?