[imagesource:thevesuviuschallenge.org]

Three students have managed to use AI to decode a burnt 2,000-year-old scroll that was found in a library in Pompeii. The trio’s efforts bagged them the grand prize of $700,000 (R13 million) in the Vesuvius Challenge. The scroll was one of the plethora of artefacts that was turned to charcoal in the Vesuvius eruption 2,000 years ago.

Silicon Valley regulars Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman created the Vesuvius Challenge in March of 2023, offering up to $1 million (R18 million) in cash prizes to any engineers who could program AIs to read the carbonised papyrus.

Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger managed to decode four passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of the characters legible. Most of the other submissions to the Vesuvius Prize only managed about 30% recovery.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey,” Mr. Nader told the Guardian. “The adrenaline rush is what kept us going. It was insane. It meant working 20-something hours a day. I didn’t know when one day ended and the next day started.”

The toasted papyrus scrolls were discovered at Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Vesuvius’ explosion, in a villa that might have belonged to Julius Caeser’s father-in-law.

The collection of 800 scrolls was discovered 275 years ago inside the only intact library. Thousands of clay tablets from the ancient kingdoms of Assyria and Babylon have also been discovered, but because clay is a more durable material than papyrus, they held up better to the ages.

The scrolls could not be opened as they would turn to ash at the slightest touch, but they were later imaged at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford by the Institut de France. These high-resolution CT scans were then released to anyone who wanted to try to decode them.

The scroll revealed writing about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures, with the apparent ‘philosopher’ writing: “…as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

The general subject of the text is pleasure, which, properly understood, is the highest good in Epicurean philosophy. In these two snippets from two consecutive columns of the scroll, the author is concerned with whether and how the availability of goods, such as food, can affect the pleasure which they provide.

 

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The researchers are now working hard to publish a paper on the full extent of the texts, and hopefully, finish the whole scroll in the not-too-distant future.

[source:goodnewsnetwork.org]