[imagesource:scrollprize.org]

A 21-year-old student named Luke Farritor became the first person in two millennia to read the text from an ancient scroll that was buried under more than 18 metres of volcanic ash after the disastrous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.

Farritor used machine learning software to ‘read’ the Greek word for “purple” in one of the hundreds of carbonized scrolls that were discovered at Herculaneum, and in the process earned himself $40,000 (R760,000) in the First Letters Award.

The prize money was awarded as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition that aims to dish out $1,000,000 (R19 million) in prize money to participants who can use AI, machine learning, and computer vision to identify letters and words in these unread scrolls.

Two $10,000 (R190,000) prizes were also awarded to Youssef Nader, a graduate student studying biorobotics at the Free University of Berlin, who independently picked out the same word shortly after Farritor.

What a day! Could not be more thankful. So much support from so many people. This is just the beginning – I won’t let you all down!

— Luke Farritor (@LukeFarritor) October 13, 2023

Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky who has spent the last 20 years developing new imaging and machine learning techniques, is leading a team that is taking on the Vesuvius Challenge. The team also includes tech investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.

“This has been the dream of many people since the scrolls were first discovered in the 1750s. It is also the result of 20 years of work from Dr Brent Seales and his team at EduceLab, whose years of dedicated work have made this last mile possible.”

Today we are announcing a major breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge: we have read the first word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll.
The word is “πορφυρας” which means “purple dye” or “cloths of purple.”https://t.co/0EDGBX4t4h

Congratulations to 21yo computer science… pic.twitter.com/VLwtU9I8xl

— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) October 12, 2023

Participants in the competition have been given access to X-ray computed tomography (CT) scans of two scrolls, starting a race to decipher the ancient writings. All of these scrolls are probably going to disclose fresh insights about life in the olden days, adding some mystery to the competition. Many of these scrolls may turn out to be works that would have been lost to time.

The project has attracted a devoted community that trades strategies and news on Discord channels, and now that the first awards have been handed out, the race is on to win the $700,000 (R13 million) Grand Prize. This downpayment on your student fees will go to whoever decodes four separate passages from the scrolls that each contain at least 140 characters of continuous text. The deadline is December 31, 2023.

“Will you be the one unlocking the knowledge in hundreds of scrolls—doubling the amount of texts from antiquity—and potentially thousands more that are yet to be excavated, becoming the last hero of the Roman Empire and winning $700,000 while you’re at it?”

The Vesuvius Challenge represents an opportunity for tech bros like Friedman and Gross, and they are among a grouping of entrepreneurs who have recently put up massive prizes for machine learning projects on campuses where a new generation of nerds grows up around AI.

Give the kids a thousand-year-old problem and some artificial intelligence, and let them run with it.  It’s one way to advance technology, and may just breed the next Musk, Jobs, or Gates.

Or whoever invented Skynet.

[source:vice]