2024-03-30 19:09:34
All about Artificial Intelligence
Previously, the Digital Look has already spoken of the “Vesuvius Challenge”, in which researchers from all over the world are challenged to decipher parchments and other writings found in the region of Pompeii (Italy). At the time, we were talking about an illegible parchment that artificial intelligence (AI) managed to decipher.
This time, according to the Nexo Newspaperonce again, AI was able to decipher part of another two-thousand-year-old papyrus charred by the fatal eruption of Mount Vesuvius (Italy), which leveled the city of Pompeii.
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Just like the parchments we mentioned in the past, “despite being stored for decades in museums in Italy, they had been considered lost”, said Odemir Bruno, computer scientist at the São Carlos Institute of Physics at the University of São Paulo (IFSC- USP), member of one of the winning teams of the “Vesúvio Challenge”.
The awards ceremony was held on March 16, at Villa Getty, in Los Angeles (USA). This museum recreates a mansion from the Roman Empire where the papyri were found. At the ceremony, three of the Brazilian winners attended; Bruno couldn’t go.
Papyri partially deciphered by AI
- The papyri were unearthed in 1750, in Herculaneum (Italy), by a farmer who was digging a well;
- He found the mansion that would have belonged to Lúcio Calpurnio Pisão Caesonino (? – 43 BC), father-in-law of Emperor Julius Caesar (100 BC – 44 BC);
- The ash that devastated the region preserved, as far as he knows for now, more than 600 rolls of papyrus, which, if they had been exposed to the air, would have fallen apart;
- “It was thought that there was nothing left written on them, previous attempts destroyed the material”, stated Bruno;
- Therefore, it was necessary to think of a new technique to open the parchments without disintegrating them;
- The idea that managed to do this came from American computer scientist Brent Seales, from the University of Kentucky (USA), which consists of digitizing the content via x-ray tomography;
- Thus, in 2023, the “Vesuvius Challenge” began, created by American investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, in partnership with Seales and funded by several financiers, especially the Musk Foundation, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, SpaceX, X and more;
- It was proposed to investigate one of the four digitized rolls at the Diamond particle accelerator, located in the United Kingdom.
Villa Getty (Imagem: Arellano915/Shutterstock)
From the tomography, several images are generated and, when stacked, they create a three-dimensional version. “The technique for unwinding was developed, but everything was still black”, said the Brazilian scientist. What does that mean? That it was impossible to see anything in the digitized material.
They wondered if there was any trace of identifiable ink on the papyrus, but to confirm (or not), they needed to resort to AI. “A global community of competitors and collaborators came together to solve the problem with computer vision, machine learning and hard work,” says the “Vesuvius Challenge” website.
The first part was identifying a simple letter, achieved by Australian physicist Casey Handmer. When analyzing the images, he found cracked patterns that looked like letters.
In the final part, one had to read one of the four digitized parchments, four excerpts with at least 140 characters, recognizing at least 85% of the whole. The objective was achieved by four teams.
In first place was an Egyptian doctoral student in bio-robotics, an American engineering student and a robotics student from Switzerland. They received US$700,000 (R$3.51 million, in direct conversion) as a prize.
Following closely behind were the other three winning teams, who received US$50,000 (R$250,760) each. One of them is Brazilian, led by ELian Rafael Dal Prá, computational physicist and undergraduate scientific student. Leonardo Scabini, both from Bruno’s group, is still a member of the post-doctoral internship.
Bruno said that “Dal Prá read about the award and brought the idea to our group, so we decided to change his project”. He also stated that the creative way of approaching a scientific enigma was a success, attracted young people and publicized the subject.
And the papyrus? What do you have to say”?
So far, the post-computational team, made up of historians and papyrologists, has managed to identify that the text is written in Greek, based on the philosophy of Epicurus, in which pleasure is of central importance.
For now, 5% of its total has been deciphered. In this remainder, the author, who is supposed to be Philodemus, apprentice of Epicurus, who was a philosopher residing in the mansion, questions how the availability of goods affects the pleasure they provide:
As is the case with food, we do not immediately think that things that are scarce are absolutely more pleasurable than those that are abundant.
Philodemus, not digitally recovered papyrus
Dal Prá started his master’s degree this year and intends to continue with his work. “Not necessarily to win the next prize, but we want to study what advances can be achieved by the codes developed in the context of the challenge”, explained Bruno.
For the unity between teams, aiming to discover more and more about the papyri, GitHub is vital, said the scientist. “The comparison between the four award-winning methods can generate knowledge about computational strategies that are also useful for solving other problems.”
For 2024, the challenge is to reach an incredible 90% reading of the four rolls digitized so far. Let’s see what the result will be.
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