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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
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.
How did they virtually unroll the scrolls?
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.
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