Three students have won a $700,000 prize after using AI to read a 2,000-year-old scroll burnt during the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79AD.
In the 18th century hundreds of papyrus scrolls were discovered in the library of a luxurious a villa in the town - the only such library of texts from ancient Roman times to be discovered. Last year a breakthrough came when Dr Brent Seales and his team at the University of Kentucky used high resolution CT scans to unroll the texts, but the black carbon ink used on the scripts was indecipherable from the papyrus itself.
Youssef Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a SpaceX intern and student, and Julian Schillinger, a Swiss Robotics student, built an AI model that was able to work out the lettering through using pattern recognition.Vesuvius ChallengeThe Greek characters, πορφύραc, revealed as the word “PURPLE,” are some of the text uncovered on the scroll