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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

#241

Post by Jeaye »

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 am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent.

The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.

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

#242

Post by [deleted] »

zzyzxd wrote: post #236
codeulike wrote: post #173

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made…

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable? But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to…

[deleted]

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

#243

Post by verditelabs »

ghghgfdfgh wrote: post #233
verditelabs wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.

I understand that the complexity of the project has increased over the years. How difficult is it for a newcomer to get into it?

It has gotten harder, unfortunately. One of the barriers to entry is simply the massive amounts of data; not everyone can set aside $100s worth of HDD or SSD space to play around. That said I have done a lot of work to dramatically reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth needed.

We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.

Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.

I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.

For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.

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

#244

Post by varenc »

It's false that the 'entire Herculaneum scroll has been read'. Much of the scroll has been lost. From the preprint, columns 1-4 lost, and then margins on other columns are also lost.

   Col. 5: "… the similar …"
   
   Col. 6: "… impulses …"
   
   Col. 9: "… so far as … this or to have … that …"
   
   Col. 10: "… that befits on the whole still … there will be fear and … the great and long …"
   
   Col. 11: "… and the impulse … For/towards each of these things in this way … we are by nature … and for/towards the fulfillment of these things that … seem …"
   
   Col. 12: "… to men and beasts … And above all, each of the most common things constitutes these … For, [necessity? necessary?] …"
   
   Col. 13: "… natural … therefore also … according to the … this … will be found, and lives will make no progress whatsoever, as we have no need for either pleasure or pain. In the same way, also …"
   
   Col. 14: "… and thus lacking … I want to say … common … accomplished … to lack … and … on the right parts towards the left ones. There is an excess in the impulse …"
   
   Col. 15: "… and of all similar things. For, according to this kind/category, according to which impulses exist by nature, there will be that which lacks nothing, so that one seeks nothing more, but completes in every respect as …"
   
   Col. 16: "… they approach completion. Moving from these things to … [λόγος?], it [τέχνη?] accomplishes within us all that pertains to it, even though it cannot fully complete nature. And it allowed …"
   
   Col. 17: "… we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect…"
   
   Col. 18: "… being that practical wisdom … and to be about it. This [sc. λόγος] concerning the mechanical arts seems to me to be very distant from such a [conception?], and to have the technical fulfilment that is, so to speak, lame and something of such type lacking, and concerning the …"
   
   Col. 19: "… need none. Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect, accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they …"
   
   Col. 20: "… to happen. And such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good—let alone beautiful—nor anything bad—let alone ugly—nor happiness …"
   
   Col. 21: "… being greatly wise and celebrated and … to praise … as according to the eulogies …"
   
   Col. 22: "… still … Aristocreon … to possessed things …"

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

#245

Post by verditelabs »

Jeaye wrote: post #241
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 am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent. The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the hu…

I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well

> Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.

Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.

One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?

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

#246

Post by verditelabs »

itsthecourier wrote: post #170
verditelabs wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.

may you please tell us how much effort goes into each type of task in those months? where else do you think these techniques be applied?

We are a core team of about 10 researchers and developers working full time on work that applies to all of the scrolls. We also ahve 4 full time annotators that tend to work on one scroll at a time. The amount of time spent on any given scroll varies with how difficult and large it is.

There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.

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

#247

Post by card_zero »

verditelabs wrote: post #245
Jeaye wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent. The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the hu…

I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well > Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's.…

1. Why is that a realization, are there really people who say "Scandinavians are just mechanical" or "9th century people were made out of wood"? Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?

2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.

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

#248

Post by wolfi1 »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #123
adriand wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?

Aristotle's second book of Poetics, of course.

we already know that a blind Italian monk burnt it to ashes, at least, that's what Eco wrote and he was a learned scholar

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

#249

Post by crypttales »

empath75 wrote: post #99
bambax wrote: post #92

Earlier 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…

[dead]

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

#250

Post by crypttales »

seizethecheese wrote: post #166
empath75 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think. Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.

I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.

The folks in the monastery were more open minded towards those who proceeded in the previous millennium than we are to those a thousand years ago.

That said, they had limited resources. This is very cool

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