"We wanted to save the archaeologists precious time that they waste on assembling fragments, which sometimes takes years and sometimes never succeeds," one of the RePair's founding scientists, Ohad Ben-Shahar of Ben-Gurion University's Department of Computer Science, toldOne of the project's initial goals is a pair of 2,000-year-old frescoes from Pompeii, an ancient Roman city that was destroyed byin 79 CE.
Like many other items discovered during the Pompeii site excavation, thousands of frescoes fragments were preserved in layers of volcanic ash. But, following investigation, specialists concluded that reassembling those fragments would be practically impossible for people to complete. As a result, for many years, the shards have been largely forgotten in a warehouse outside of Pompeii.
"The computer will present intermediate results to us as necessary and will ask to consult with a human expert who will determine whether the result is good or whether the computer will have to be adjusted to help put it in the right direction," added Ben-Shahar. "People have always built machines to help them. In our project, autonomous machines will be helped by people."