2023-10-18 11:53:27
Between 500 and 600 charred scrolls from Herculaneum, carefully preserved in museums, universities and national collections in England, France and Italy, remain shrouded in mystery, challenging the curiosity of historians and archaeologists. Their extreme fragility makes physically unrolling them a risky task, as a single wrong move could break them like glass. However, technology has come to the rescue, and a revolutionary approach is beginning to unlock the secrets encoded in these ancient scrolls.
Technological advances since the early 2000s have helped researchers overcome this obstacle, such as using CT scans to obtain 3D images of ancient scrolls. From there, the Digital Restoration Initiative team developed software that could “virtually unwrap” the 3D images to produce flattened segments. This method allowed them to read the previously hidden text of the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred and fragmented scroll from the Near East dated to the 3rd or 4th century AD.
However, when researchers attempted to use this method to read the scrolls charred by Vesuvius, they ran into another obstacle. The ink used on the Ein Gedi scroll contained metal, so the letters were visible on the scan. The Herculaneum scrolls, on the other hand, were written with carbon-based ink, which, to the human eye, makes the symbols indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus in tomography scans.
Undeterred, the researchers wondered whether higher-resolution scans of the scrolls produced using a particle accelerator could provide an even more detailed look at the charred papyrus. Indeed, at very high resolutions, the scans revealed visible areas where the ink had slightly altered the shape and texture of the papyrus fibers. “The carbon-based ink fills in the holes that form the papyrus grid, covers them and makes them a little thicker,” explains Seales.
The Greek characters πορφύραc, which spell the word “purple c,” are among the text characters extracted by Vesuvius Challenge contestants Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader.
Vesuvius Challenge Photography
Seales and his colleagues at the Digital Restoration Initiative developed and trained a machine learning model to detect these subtle differences in the charred surfaces of the papyrus. But to take the project further, they needed the help of human beings. That’s where the Vesuvius Challenge comes into play. Hoping to harness the collective power of citizen scientists around the world, Seales partnered with Silicon Valley investors and put his team’s data, code, and methods online for anyone to access. The argument of the challenge? After 275 years, the puzzle of the Herculaneum scrolls has been reduced to a software problem that, in theory, anyone, anywhere, with access to a computer could help solve.
In March, the challenge team published thousands of 3D images of two rolled scrolls, as well as a machine learning algorithm trained to detect the invisible letters and symbols written on the layers of charred papyrus. They also offered a million-dollar prize to incentivize participants to improve AI technology and ultimately speed up decryption.
Two competitors extracted the new text fragment separately: Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (United States), and Youssef Nader, a 26-year-old doctoral student at the Free University of Berlin (Germany). ). As Farritor revealed the text first, he won $40,000, while Nader won $10,000. Papyrologists also authenticated their findings.
Still up for grabs is the grand prize of $700,000, which will be awarded to the first person or team to reveal at least four different passages from the two scrolls. Each passage must contain at least 140 characters of continuous text, with no more than 15% of the characters missing or illegible, by the end of 2023.
Citizen scientists can find everything they need on the Internet, from the history of the scrolls themselves to data, algorithms, and downloadable tutorials. And although the contest is open to anyone, it is a technical work that so far has attracted mainly computer scientists already versed in machine learning. Contestants are helping advance the project by virtually unwrapping additional sections of the scrolls using software and methods developed by Seales; They are also working to improve the machine learning model by providing it with additional training examples from the newly unwrapped digital papyrus segments.
The competitors (an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 in total, according to Seales) have done their part. In just six months, they’ve made giant strides toward solving this puzzle, including the three full lines of text Farritor and Nader recently revealed. “We’ve seen 10 or 20 years of work from these competitors,” Seales says.
What motivates contestants to dedicate hours and hours of their time to the project? Prize money is an important factor (both Nader and Farritor say they want to win the grand prize) but, in addition, some contestants are simply intrigued by the scrolls themselves. “When things got a little frustrating and didn’t work out, I felt unable to give up because I was too curious: I really need to know what’s going on here,” Nader says.
There is also the attraction of working on a project backed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, launched the contest along with Daniel Gross, venture capitalist; other startup founders and investors also contributed money for the prizes. “There’s a kind of prestige in Silicon Valley,” says Farritor, who spent the summer interning at SpaceX.
From here, the machine learning model should continue to improve further and reveal more letters until, ideally, researchers can decipher all of the Herculaneum scrolls. These efforts could pave the way for future excavation work at Herculaneum, where some experts believe more scrolls are still buried.
“Some might think, ‘Why are you going to all that trouble?’, but I don’t think so,” Seales says. “This is an amazing period in human history. We’re talking about more works from that period. Yes, I want more, I want it all.”
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