Three researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret a 2,000-year-old scroll buried during the Mount Vesuvius explosion that destroyed Pompeii.
On Monday (Feb 5), the researchers received a $700,000 cash reward for achieving the impossible.
According to the organizers of the “Vesuvius Challenge,” the Herculaneum papyri contain almost 800 rolled-up Greek scrolls carbonized during the 79 CE volcanic explosion that destroyed the ancient Roman town of Pompeii.
The scrolls, which resembled logs of hardened ash, were held at the National Library of Naples and the Institut de France in Paris, where they suffered considerable damage and even crumbled after attempts to roll them open.
After being unable to open them, the Vesuvius Challenge performed high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls and offered several rewards to accelerate research into them. The money promised was one million dollars.
Researchers decipher approximately 5% of scrolls
The three researchers that received the prize were Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, Youssef Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.
The group employed artificial intelligence technologies to discern between ink and papyrus, as well as pattern recognition to decipher the thin and practically unreadable Greek letters.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods in the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, chair of the Herculaneum Society and a classicist, said in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
The researchers had to decipher four paragraphs containing at least 140 characters, 85 percent of which were recoverable.
Last year, Farritor decrypted the first word inscribed on one of the scrolls, which was the Greek word for “purple.”
According to the organizers, the researchers’ combined efforts have resulted in the decryption of roughly 5% of the scroll.
The scroll’s author was “probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus,” who wrote “about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures,” according to contest organizer Nat Friedman in an X post.
The scrolls were discovered at a home that was previously thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s patrician father-in-law. The villa has a mostly unexcavated land with a library that housed thousands of manuscripts.