A team of three students won $700,000 for using artificial intelligence to read the first passages of a 2,000 year old scroll burned in the volcanic eruption of 79 AD.
The ancient papyrus scroll is one of over 800 - known as the Herculaneum papyri - that were carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Researchers discovered the trove in the 18th century, but attempts to read them proved futile and, even worse, destructive. Unrolling them by hand only caused them to fall apart.
That’s where the Vesuvius Challenge comes in. Since it launched last year, researchers around the world have been endeavouring to decipher scans of one of the scrolls without ever actually touching it. The prize-winning team, announced on 6 February, identified over 2,000 of the text’s Greek letters. Their submission was “met with widespread amazement” by the review team of papyrologists, according to the Vesuvius Challenge’s announcement.
Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and two entrepreneurs, Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, set up the Vesuvius Challenge, offering more than $1 million in prize money for reaching a series of milestones using “computer vision, machine learning and hard work.”
On Monday, Nat Friedman posted on X: "Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded."
When the challenge was established, the organizers released high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls and explained the contest’s rules: To win the $700,000 grand prize, participants would need to decipher at least 85 percent of four passages, each of which should be at least 140 characters. Smaller prizes are also awarded for lesser accomplishments, including $40,000 to the first person to decipher any word - which was 'porphyras' (meaning 'purple' in ancient Greek). This sum was awarded in October to one of the three students (Luke Farritor) who just claimed the $700,000 prize.
So what do these passages say? They appear to be a philosophical discussion of life’s pleasures, including music and food, though the papyrology team is still studying the results. “Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise,” write the organizers in the announcement. “But it seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2,000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.”
The three students on the winning team were: Youssef Nader, an Egyptian PhD student in Germany; Julian Schilliger, a robotics student in Switzerland; and Luke Farritor, a computer science student in Nebraska.
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