Inside the AI-Powered Race to Decode Ancient Roman Scrolls

On a Saturday night in late August, Luke Farritor, a 21-year old computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was on his way home from a party at a friend's house in Omaha when he saw something on his phone that he says almost caused him to break into tears and fall to the floor.
Farritor had spent the last six months poring over 3D X-rays of ancient scrolls, often for more than 40 hours per week, all alongside internships and his studies. While he was at the party he had received a message informing him that new segments of scanned and virtually flattened scrolls had just been uploaded. With the music blaring around him, he logged onto his PC remotely to set the AI model that he’d built to detect ink from previous scroll scans to work on the new segments and rejoined the party.
After driving home, on the walk back to his college dorm from the parking lot, Farritor remembered the scrolls and checked his phone.
On his phone display were three ancient Greek letters-π, ο, ρ (pi, omicron, rho). Farritor was the first to read the letters in nearly 2,000 years. “I completely freaked out,” he tells TIME.
Farritor, who on Oct. 12 won $40,000 for his breakthrough, is one of thousands of competitors racing to read the Herculaneum papyri, ancient Roman scrolls buried and preserved by a volcanic eruption. Farritor’s work builds on the work of the other competitors, for which 36 prizes have been handed out in total. On messaging platform Discord the atmosphere among competitors is collaborative-they share code and emerging results from their work alongside photos of pumpkins they bought and poems inspired by the competition-even as the dash for the $700,000 grand prize intensifies.
The competition is organized by the academic who invented virtual unwrapping and a tech investor who became obsessed with the Romans during the Covid-19 lockdown. Whoever wins, a bounty of ancient knowledge will soon be breached.
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[@daveduvergier3412]

To grasp the extraordinary potential of this work, imagine what those unread scrolls might contain: here is what the late great Carl Sagan had to say about the destruction of the library of Alexandria:
In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of the works that were destroyed. In most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors. We do know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library, only seven survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and A Winter's Tale, but we had heard that he had written certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized in his time, works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.

[@LordTelperion]

This!

[@JacquesMare]

For those interested: not all of the site has been excavated so there's a real chance that there may be many more scrolls slowly decaying in the dirt.
If we all write incessantly to those individuals and organizations with ample money, we may be able to get them to resume excavations and save this legacy for posterity.

[@Megan_XD]

This technology is breathtaking!

[@drockjr]

This is super cool.

[@godzilla4259]

4:45 i think that Phi look more like a Psi

[@eliseolopez2790]

What is the volume of the ancient library of the Americas

[@jaga11de]

This is the only thing where AI should be used for good…

[@edwardmiessner6502]

Imagine if a scroll was uncovered that contained a letter from Vespasian to Calpurnius Piso thanking him for writing the gospel of Mark for the Flavian's Christ project!

[@katherineozbirn6426]

You need a contest to get people to do the right thing?? Incredible. I hope they enjoy their trips to Tahiti on the prize money.

[@petersclafani4370]

You have to encounter a real roman