Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

scrollprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 218 posts

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

#21

Post by versteegen »

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…

Can't speak for the video, but this is a bit misleading actually. What cracked this was actually visual inspection looking for patterns which could then be used as better training data, which so far apparently hasn't found very many letters that were too hard to see. Read the OP describing the iterative process of hand-annotation guided by output of a model, then retraining the model with the additional data, it's a fascinating technique! Simply using deep learning on the initially available ground truths without knowing what features the models should be looking for actually pretty much didn't work!

Also, so far the process of virtually unrolling the scrolls is mostly manual and extremely labour intensive.

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

#22

Post by carapace »

jdminhbg wrote: post #16

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.

Why the ad for Amazon?

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

#24

Post by michael_nielsen »

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 likely somehow a reference to the Emperor. Purple cloth was extremely rare and expensive, and it was the colour worn by the Emperors. Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. I don't know if that was yet true at the time of Vesuvius, although Wikipedia claims Caligula may have had someone killed for wearing purple.

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

#25

Post by jdminhbg »

carapace wrote: post #22
jdminhbg wrote: post #16

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.

Why the ad for Amazon?

It's just a reference to making a boring, pervasive part of culture. Please feel free to buy those translations at any book company you feel like.

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

#27

Post by dataflow »

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.

> $700k is a life changing amount of money

Probably ~half of that will go to taxes?

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

#28

Post by hansoolo »

Rallen89 wrote: post #26

>Shortly after that, another contestant, Youssef Nader, independently discovered the same word in the same area, with even clearer results — winning the second place prize of $10,000. That's what u get for optimising your code

I thought the same. He had the better results, but too late.

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

#29

Post by carapace »

jdminhbg wrote: post #25
carapace wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the ad for Amazon?

It's just a reference to making a boring, pervasive part of culture. Please feel free to buy those translations at any book company you feel like.

Sorry, I'm just cranky this morning.
Post reply on HN