The Vesuvius Project succeeds!

[Chuckanut]

The Vesuvius Challenge succeeds!

When Mount Vesuvius erupted 2000 years ago it fried a number of scrolls into preserved but severely carbonized rolls. Some scrolls were found in the 1800’s, removed and stored. But, they could not be opened to read because they would instantly fall apart into charred dust. What to do?

https://scrollprize.org/grandprize

The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
February 5th, 2024
We’re announcing the winners of the Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize. We’ll look at how they did it, what the scrolls say, and what comes next.

On March 15th, 2023, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge to answer this question. Scrolls from the Institut de France were imaged at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford. We released these high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls, and we offered more than $1M in prizes, put forward by many generous donors.

machine learning, and hard work.

Less than a year later, in December 2023, they succeeded. Finally, after 275 years, we can begin to read the scrolls:

In case you fear the younger generation take a look at the team who won the Grand Prize for the best reading of the scrolls after they were scanned.

You may remember Youssef. He is the Egyptian PhD student in Berlin who was able to read a few columns of text back in October, winning the second-place First Letters Prize. His results back then were particularly clear and readable, which made him the natural lead for the team that formed.

You might remember Luke as well: he is the 21-year-old college student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, who was the first person in history to read an entire word from the inside of a Herculaneum scroll (ΠΟΡΦΥΡΑϹ, “purple”). This won him the first-place First Letters Prize, a few weeks before Youssef’s results.

And finally, you might remember Julian. He is the Swiss robotics student at ETH Zürich, who won three Segmentation Tooling prizes for his incredible work on Volume Cartographer. This enabled the 3d-mapping of the papyrus areas you see before you.

How did they virtually unroll the scrolls?

How does the unrolling work?
Roughly, virtual unwrapping works in three steps:
Scanning: creating a 3D scan of a scroll or fragment using X-ray tomography.
Segmentation: tracing the crumpled layers of the rolled papyrus in the 3D scan and then unrolling, or flattening, them.
Ink Detection: identifying the inked regions in the flattened segments using a machine learning model.
These scrolls were scanned at Diamond Light Source, a particle accelerator near Oxford, England. The facility produces a parallel beam of X-rays at high flux, allowing for fast, accurate, and high-resolution imaging. The X-ray photos are turned into a 3D volume of voxels using tomographic reconstruction algorithms, resulting in a stack of slice images.

 

[Gremlin]

Cool! Congrats to the three who won the Grand prize! I thought this quote from the article was interesting: “ Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise. But it seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.”

Awesome!

 

[braumeister]

Having recently read quite a bit of Seneca, the snippets they quoted sound very much like his writing style.

 

[Chuckanut]

Here’s a great article on how the project to unroll and read the scrolls came about:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-ai-unlock-ancient-world-secrets/

In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.

But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.

 

[Gumby]

This is quite interesting. I visited the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, and I wondered how we might ever be able to read the remains of the scrolls.

 

[Tadpole]

Now you're un-cooking. Been telling people the younger generation is awesome.

 

[Out-to-Lunch]

Nice article, thanks for posting. In my former position as a professor, I did work similar to this. Not the fancy AI-algorithm stuff, but the x-ray data acquisition and analysis part. I never did an experiment at Diamond, but worked at many similar large synchrotrons in the US and Europe. The experiments and analyses my group did in the latter part of my career were closely related to the computed tomographic techniques discussed in the article. So it was fun and interesting to me to see where that part of the field has progressed to. Color me very impressed.

 

[Walt34]

What they did and how they did it is way over my head, but being able to read 2,000 year old deep-fried scrolls (okay, I took some literary license there) is way cool.

 

[Zona]

This is so fascinating, thanks for posting a link to the full page. Tremendous work by all involved in this project! Occasionally I do transcription for the Library of Congress By the People project (which involves transcribing documents written mostly in English but sometimes very tricky to decipher the cursive handwriting). But what this team has achieved makes that look like child's play.

I'm eager to see what other "new-to-us" works they can transcribe that would otherwise have been lost to history, very cool!