A carbonized papyrus scroll unearthed from a villa in the wealthy town of Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Researchers today announced a major step forward in"reading" the texts recorded inside these brittle husks—which may include previously unknown ancient works of literature and philosophy.With the help of artificial intelligence, the ancient Greek word for purple has emerged from a text damaged in the A.D.
The Greek characters, πορφύραc, which spell the word"purple," are among the characters and multiple lines of text that have been extracted by Vesuvius Challenge contestants Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader.
Between 500 and 600 carbonized scrolls from Herculaneum—kept in museum, university and national collections in England, France and Italy—remain unopened, though the exact figure is hard to estimate because many are fragmented. The scrolls are extremely brittle, which means physically unrolling them is not a viable option. “If you drop one, it would shatter like glass,” Seales explains..
Still on the line is the $700,000 grand prize, which will go to the first person or team that can reveal at least four separate passages from the two scrolls. Each passage must contain at least 140 characters of continuous text, with no more than 15 percent of the characters missing or illegible, by the end of 2023.. And while the contest is open to anyone, it’s technical work that’s so far mostly attracted computer scientists who are already well-versed in machine learning.
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