by This month, three computer scientists won the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to use artificial intelligence to uncover four pieces of ancient Greek that had been covered for 2,000 years inside a charred scroll. The artifact was found at Herculaneum, a Roman resort town that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
This “kind of thing happens every half a century or so,” Richard Janko, a professor of classics at the University of Michigan and one of the contest’s judges, told The Daily Beast. Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy and another judge, told the Daily Beast that the discovery “could be a big revolution.”
The technology enables archaeologists to “see” inside burned, sodden and sealed ancient texts. This includes works of classical antiquity, hidden writing wrapped in Egyptian mummies, books burned in the Second World War, thousands of fragments of texts found in the Dead Sea that could shed new light on the early history of Christianity.
Perfectly preserved by the volcanic eruption, the town is the kind of space where destruction and preservation go hand in hand, Nicolardi said. Archaeologists have spent hundreds of years excavating parts of Herculaneum, including the Villa Dei Papiri, from which approximately 1,800 cataloged fragments or complete scrolls have been found.
Herculaneum scroll with red laser lines being scanned at the Institut de France by Brent Seales and his team.
EduceLab.
However, the scrolls are extremely fragile. After all, they are ancient in addition to being burned and charred. As a result, hundreds have been destroyed by people trying to unroll them by hand or using machines. Because of this, there are only a few hundred left that can be read.
That’s the premise behind the competition: If the team could crack open one of them digitally, it would be easy to digitally unwrap anything else by comparison.
Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross backed the competition, which offered a $1 million grand prize to the person or team that could generate at least four columns of readable digital text from scans of the Herculaneum scroll by the end of the year. 2023. The winning team consisted of AI engineers named Youssef Nader, Julian Schillinger, and Luke Farritor who were able to retrieve 15 columns of text from the paper, revealing the ancient Greek lines laid out like a newspaper.
The process they used was first used by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, who has spent 20 years using the technology to digitally analyze and restore ancient texts. The tool, called the Volume Cartographer, uses AI to digitally unravel the layers of a single burnt scroll of paper that Seales’ team had 3D scanned.
This AI Bot Translates Ancient Dead Languages into English
But the challenge is not over yet. The team’s winning entry represents only five percent of one scroll. For 2024, Friedman, Gross, and Seales have a new contest: Unroll an entire scroll to win a $100,000 prize. Finally, they want to digitally release all the intact and intact Herculaneum scrolls.
If they succeed in achieving that, the library could reveal new information about some of the most famous people in history such as Aristotle and Archimedes. Janko also said that the text that revealed the contest could have been written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and teacher of the famous Roman poet, Virgil.
But first, more of the scroll needs to be separated, which is the technical term for unraveling digital layers of paper. Then there’s the matter of translating what they find, which can be a herculean task – made less so with the help of AI. “Reading the paper is not a matter of recognizing letters,” Nicolardi said. “Understanding the text is more of a question.”
Rise of the Archaeologist AI
The use of computers and scanning techniques in archeology is not new. The first mummy to be analyzed by X-ray was in 1896. Such technology has long been used to uncover archaeological finds since more than a century. Before Seales’ digital unwrapping tool, however, Janko estimated that it would take at least 500 years to go through the Herculaneum scrolls.
Seales solved the problem of unrolling the fragile scrolls by using synchrotron scanning, which involves shooting powerful particle accelerator lasers at a scroll and creating high-fidelity X-rays that reveal all its layers. From there, each layer must be picked out and separated. The inner layers are the easiest to peel apart, Seales said.
“It was really gratifying to see this young brain trust in people, who really understand AI, to see them get excited about the classics,” Seales said.
Although this protocol has only been used on these scrolls so far, it has a wide range of archaeological applications. For example, Seales used the technology to digitally unpack some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as a copy of the Book of Leviticus found in a burned synagogue at En Gedi, Israel from the third or fourth century CE.
He also plans to scan and discover a still-sealed Egyptian papyrus scroll in the Smithsonian Collection. This artifact, bandaged in linen and sealed with wax marked with the symbol of Amenhotep III, dates to around 1400 BCE and has never been opened.
Seales also used the technique to see burned medieval books inside found from the wreck of Chartres, a French town near Paris that was largely destroyed in World War II during the Allied bombing campaign in 1944.
Another potential treasure could be falling deep in the Black Sea, Janko said. There are at least 67 ancient shipwrecks on the sea floor—because the water is oxygen-free below 140 meters or so in depth—that have never decayed, being frozen and shipped in time. Possible treasures include a box of books and scrolls that may hold more ancient historical secrets. These technological advances may now make it possible to retrieve and view those papers, Janko said.
It’s not just the classics that could see a revival in discoveries: There is also the possibility of applying the technology to old slides and film negatives that are corroded and cannot be developed or read using traditional methods , Seales said.
So far, however, researchers are still working on a translation they can trust for the 15 columns they have so far. This is a process that the most humble Silicon Valley evangelist cannot speed up, explained Nicolardi. . it and meditation,” she said. The scroll itself makes much of the same point. Nicolardi notes that the last sentence means the following: “To us always the truth.”
Read more at The Daily Beast.
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