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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

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

#251

Post by crypttales »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #120
empath75 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For our understanding of Christianity, the Pompeii eruption was too soon to the events, so unless the owner was amongst the first Christians worldwide and there is a dated letter from St Luke foretelling the destruction of the temple I don't think it'll be too revolutionary

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

#253

Post by [deleted] »

verditelabs wrote: post #152
amluto wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it? Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able t…

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink. A lot of…

[deleted]

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

#254

Post by altmanaltman »

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…

Our predictions for the future are always rooted in the current generation thinking. We can imagine technology advancing but we imagine society staying the same in this future. For example, lets say we can go back into the past and fully convince the romans that spaceships are real and in year 2300, we will leave earth in mass transit to Venus. They might believe the premise but will have a hard time believing the ships wont have place to store their slaves or that slavery wouldn't exist in the future.

Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly

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

#255

Post by _boffin_ »

verditelabs wrote: post #175
Izmaki wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that. Hats off!

In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a pric…

I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work.

If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?

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

#256

Post by verditelabs »

_boffin_ wrote: post #255
verditelabs wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a pric…

I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work. If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?

The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.

Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.

A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.

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

#257

Post by raincole »

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…

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

By definition we can't, since your premise is that:

> future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon

So if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it'd be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.

I once had a sci-fi idea (I'm sure I'm not the first one who came up with this though):

> In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.

> Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species' knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.

It's quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.

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

#258

Post by tokioyoyo »

verditelabs wrote: post #256
_boffin_ wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work. If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?

The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work. Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously cl…

This is one of the most fascinating comments I’ve ever read. Thank you so much!

I was wondering, how does this all get funded?

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