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

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

scrollprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 404 posts

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

#361

Post by verditelabs »

mmooss wrote: post #360
verditelabs wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather tha…

We scan the full scrolls a 2.4 micron and scan portions of them at up to .5 micron. This is 1000x to 4000x higher resolution than your standard medical CT scanner, so that requires a lot more power to get readings at such high resolution. There are other properties that make large synchrotrons more amenable to our task but I am not an xray technician so am not qualified to speak to most of them.

Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.

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

#364

Post by ex-aws-dude »

verditelabs wrote: post #159
thom wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that h…

I'm curious prior to this has there been any research/attempts at chemical methods to strengthen the structure and allow it to be unrolled?

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

#365

Post by Upvoter33 »

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…

Lots of great work that pioneered here (I wish the website did a better job showing that?)

e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

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

#367

Post by verditelabs »

Upvoter33 wrote: post #365
verditelabs wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Lots of great work that pioneered here (I wish the website did a better job showing that?) e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab lab at U of K, and U of K as a whole. The purpose of the scrollprize website is not to showcase the 25 years of research leading up to the Vesuivus Challenge. It's to showcase what the Vesuivus Challenge is doing.

Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.

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

#369

Post by Upvoter33 »

verditelabs wrote: post #367
Upvoter33 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of great work that pioneered here (I wish the website did a better job showing that?) e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab lab at U of K, and U of K as a whole. The purpose of the scrollprize website is not to showcase the 25 years of research leading up to the Vesuivus Challenge. It's to showcase what the…

ah cool - thanks for the clarification. some of the comments here read like nothing like this has ever been done before ...

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

#370

Post by verifex »

melicerte wrote: post #302

Did anyone notice that anonymous donators[1] have the picture of Larry David, and the link points to the Curb Your Enthusiasm - Anonymous Donor Pt2[2] episode? So geeky, so cool ! - [1] https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors - [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y

That is a nice easter egg!
Post reply on HN