AI and scientists unite to decipher old scrolls charred by the Vesuvius volcano
The heat and volcanic ash from Vesuvius destroyed the town and preserved the scrolls in an unreadable state, turning them into charred fragile blocks that disintegrate if unrolled physically.
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Scholars and scientists have worked for more than 250 years on ways to decipher the scrolls, the vast majority of which are held in the National Library of Naples.
In 2023, several tech executives sponsored the 'Vesuvius Challenge' competition, offering cash rewards for efforts to decipher the scrolls with machine learning, computer vision, and geometry.
On Wednesday, the challenge announced a 'historic breakthrough,' saying researchers had managed to generate the first image of the inside of one of the three scrolls held at Oxford University's Bodleian Library.
University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, said the organizers were 'thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll.' He said it 'contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll.'
The scroll was scanned by Diamond Light Source, a lab at Harwell, near Oxford, that uses a particle accelerator known as a synchrotron to create an intensely powerful X-ray.
Scientists then used AI to piece together the images, search for ink that reveals where there is writing, and enhance the clarity of the text. The process led to a 3D image of the scroll that allowed experts to unroll it virtually, using a process called segmentation.
AI, as it stands, has its limits. Little of the text has been deciphered so far. One of the few words that has been made out is the ancient Greek word for 'disgust.'
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Scholars are being encouraged to join in the effort to complete the text.
'We are still at the beginning of a long process,' Peter Toth, the Cornelia Starks Curator of Greek Collections at the Bodleian, told The Associated Press. 'We need better images, and they are very positive and very, very confident that they can still improve the image quality and the legibility of the text.'
Toth also laid out his hope that the technology can be made available locally, so that the other two fragile scrolls will not have to be transported to Diamond's headquarters.
'Maybe there will be something which can be moved,' he said. 'And then don't forget that there is like 1000 more scrolls in Naples.'
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