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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

#31

Post by kelsey9876543 »

versteegen wrote: post #21
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…

Thank you for adding the deeper insight! The competition and the methods used are very fascinating indeed.

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

#33

Post by alanbernstein »

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.

Surely they will be public domain by now??

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

#34

Post by QuercusMax »

hansoolo wrote: post #28
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.

Or maybe the winner optimized his code, resulting in faster time to get results. Either one is equally plausible!

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

#35

Post by thrway63245 »

dataflow wrote: post #27
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?

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.

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

#36

Post by latchkey »

cosmojg wrote: post #32
latchkey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312385

Where do they say that the winners used that cluster?

It is an assumption based on the fact that the codebase uses cuda and the main backer of the project owns the cluster.

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

#37

Post by Arete314159 »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #24
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.

The other word visible is "oino", wine. Wine can be described as purple.

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

#38

Post by lexicality »

alanbernstein wrote: post #33
jdminhbg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely they will be public domain by now??

It is disgraceful that the ancient Greek authors won't see an obol that these so called "translators" and "historians" make from reselling their work.

They should sue! /s

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

#39

Post by riffraff »

seydor wrote: post #9
0xf00ff00f wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A laundry list with something purple...

purple was the color of nobility and rather rare. It might be the description of a king or a room or roman fashion items.

Or a complaint about bad writers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

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

#40

Post by jdminhbg »

alanbernstein wrote: post #33
jdminhbg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely they will be public domain by now??

The original Greek text is, but I got a C in Greek so I’ll have to pay for a copyrighted English translation.
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