I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
[deleted]
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
111–120 of 404 posts
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?
Probably a lot more texts of Epicurean philosophy and not a whole lot else unfortunately according to my papyrologist friend.
in the paper it says "The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC."
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#113Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too! There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.
Where are these jobs for non specialist swes?
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount? have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?
30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March. The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls. The main limitation is t…
You had to pay? I understand the machine cost many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I would have thought for academic researchers doing open science, the beamtime is free (funded by the govt / science trusts).
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>technology that build the pyramids You mean ropes and carts?
The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
Would be neat, loss of knowledge/skill is really a bummer in regards to ancient technology.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#116Earlier 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…
We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.
The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#117I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
Outstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?
[dead]
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?
Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.
That's incredibly impressive.
Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#119Where is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.
Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
#120Earlier 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…
Could change our understanding of history - slavery, early Christianity, politics, secularism among roman elite, etc
Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc