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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

scrollprize.org

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Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#21

Post by verditelabs »

tsol wrote: post #18
verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there

I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#22

Post by verditelabs »

cl3misch wrote: post #14
bobowzki wrote: post #9

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum. A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...

Fortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don't need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#23

Post by fintechjock »

verditelabs wrote: post #13
echelon wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

I've been on the Discord for a couple of years now, and poking around with submissions as well. Sean and the entire team deserve so much praise for all of this work.

It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#24

Post by roflmaostc »

bobowzki wrote: post #9

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum. A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

I found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for.

Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...

So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#25

Post by helterskelter »

verditelabs wrote: post #20
helterskelter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?

That's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniq…

Thanks!

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#26

Post by verditelabs »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #6

Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.

I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#27

Post by 9dev »

Every 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.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#28

Post by inglor_cz »

verditelabs wrote: post #2

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

I don't have any questions, just a comment.

You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.

That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.

Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#29

Post by _verandaguy »

I imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :)

But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.

Re: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

#30

Post by giancarlostoro »

9dev wrote: post #27

Every 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.
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