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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

#181

Post by Izkata »

utopcell wrote: post #91

This, along with the way the Antikythera mechanism [1] fragments were decoded [2], always brings to mind the ending of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence", where aliens far into the future managed to recreate part of human civilization from remaining artifacts and a barely working robot child. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wp3wL8g2Eg

The design of those "aliens" always had me thinking they were super-advanced robots uncovering the beginning of their civilization.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

bb123 wrote: post #157
dr_dshiv wrote: post #144

I highly recommend getting into classical literature. It is incredible and beyond conception — I had a light scattering in my education, but only later and recently have I discovered how incredible it can be. Suggested Reading for beginners: * Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus * The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves) * Life of Alexander by Plutarch * Education of Cyrus by…

> It is incredible and beyond conception Could you elaborate a little bit about what you think gives it these qualities? I've dabbled in some classical literature before but I've always found them to be very difficult reads, so I rarely have the motivation to finish them. I am wondering if there is something I am missing about the genre.

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by 1-more »

gambiting wrote: post #146
dclowd9901 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think people in those days wrote bullshit. You had to know how to write, and if you did, no one was entreating you to write grocery lists.

They absolutely did, we have plenty of proof of ancient romans and other cultures writing down jokes, little squabbles, "John was here" on walls etc, one of the oldest known pieces of writing is literally one merchant complaining to another merchant about some marble that wasn't as ordered.

on walls and tablets, but on papyrus? Papyrus was expensive.

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

#184

Post by idontpost »

dataflow wrote: post #135
lazide wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one can not consider that life changing in that context?

> No one can not consider that life changing in that context? Money only changes your life when you do something with it. If you just just let it sit (for retirement or whatever) and continue living as before, then your life hasn't changed (yet). If you dispute this, then consider the most extreme case: what happens if you (say) die before you have a chance to use that money during retirement? Did that money change y…

[dead]

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

#185

Post by idontpost »

thrway63245 wrote: post #35
dataflow wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $700k is a life changing amount of money Probably ~half of that will go to taxes?

Not sure why this is downvoted. Yes, in California half will go to taxes and the rest is enough for a downpayment on a shack. Hardly life changing.

[dead]

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

#186

Post by wut-wut »

spiritplumber wrote: post #81
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.

The first meme dump.

Well done.

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

#188

Post by xhevahir »

bb123 wrote: post #157
dr_dshiv wrote: post #144

I highly recommend getting into classical literature. It is incredible and beyond conception — I had a light scattering in my education, but only later and recently have I discovered how incredible it can be. Suggested Reading for beginners: * Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus * The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves) * Life of Alexander by Plutarch * Education of Cyrus by…

> It is incredible and beyond conception Could you elaborate a little bit about what you think gives it these qualities? I've dabbled in some classical literature before but I've always found them to be very difficult reads, so I rarely have the motivation to finish them. I am wondering if there is something I am missing about the genre.

Part of why a lot of readers have found this literature to be inexhaustible is, I think, its surprising combination of familiarity (since it's had so much influence on subsequent Western culture) and foreignness. For example, consider the career of the term "hero," which seems to have meant something like a warrior-aristocrat in Homer, and later, in Greek tragedy, takes on the moral grandeur that we meet with in characters like Oedipus, but somehow also is used to describe the boxer Kleomedes, who massacred dozens of kids because he was upset over losing a match.

When I first started reading classical literature I was struck by an idea I found in Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind, that Homer, apart from having no words corresponding to our "mind" or "soul," didn't even refer to the body as a single whole--more as a collection of limbs. The article here talks about this: https://intertheory.org/torrente.htm .

None of this makes ancient literature easier to read, though, unfortunately.

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

#189

Post by gojomo »

versteegen wrote: post #179
radarsat1 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the method becomes scalable the machine learning stuff is cool, but it's important not to discount the apparently pretty manual labour still involved in the virtual unwrapping: > Early in the summer, a small team of annotators (the “segmentation team”) joined our effort. They began mapping the 3D structure of the scroll using tools initially built by EduceLab and improved by our community. By July we had segment…

Actually it's much worse than that. Only a very small fraction of the first of the two scanned scrolls has been segmented/unwrapped after 5 months, and it's the easiest parts that are done -- about 1000cm^2 across something like 100 layers of papyrus 10cm wide. Only 50cm^2 of scroll 2 is done. Where the sheets are right against each other is much harder.

But at the same time: scanning tech & software automation just keep getting better, including via spillovers from other unrelated projects.

The ability of an ML system to learn to mimic what the manual "virtual unrolling" process is doing, from a small number of examples-to-follow, is growing.

Each bit of success, once confirmed by other experts or correlation with other texts, improves the training data.

Eventually a fully-software pushbutton pipeline of "raw imaging to likely texts" should be possible.

And if, say, some of the scrolls are sufficiently 'read' nondestructively to embolden teams to risk destructive techniques – such as incremental ablation while reading the exact chemicals at every coordinate – even higher-resolution data could become available.

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

#190

Post by utopcell »

Izkata wrote: post #181
utopcell wrote: post #91

This, along with the way the Antikythera mechanism [1] fragments were decoded [2], always brings to mind the ending of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence", where aliens far into the future managed to recreate part of human civilization from remaining artifacts and a barely working robot child. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wp3wL8g2Eg

The design of those "aliens" always had me thinking they were super-advanced robots uncovering the beginning of their civilization.

Quite possibly. Also, the flash-forward in that movie was after 2,000 years, which would make the connection with the Antikythera mechanism and the Herculaneum scroll even more relevant. We are the "aliens".
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