Inside the AI-Powered Race to Decode Ancient Roman Scrolls

I was thinking of the Roman Empire, as one does occasionally. I found a book called 24 Hours in Ancient Rome, and I started reading it. Turned out the book, I kind of realized halfway through, was actually written for 8th graders. But it was a great book, I highly recommend it, and it kind of just threw me down this ancient Rome rabbit hole. And eventually I stumbled upon the story of this villa that had been covered by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. It had been the home to an enormous library of papyrus scrolls, and that in fact, this was the only library of papyrus scrolls that in some way had survived since antiquity. Knapfriedman is one of many people who are obsessed with a collection of carbonized papyrus scrolls, discovered inside the ruins of a luxurious Herculaneum villa in 1752. Since then, there have been many attempts to unravel and read the scrolls, which unfortunately ended up destroying or damaging them. Now, artificial intelligence tools provide a new opportunity to decode the content of the scrolls. I'm a computer scientist, not a manuscript scholar or an historian, but I did have this engineering idea that we could do digital restoration of pages that are not flat, we could make them flat, and ultimately of things that are wrapped up that we could totally unwrap. Brent Seales has spent much of his career thinking about how to read ancient scrolls. In 2002, that's when we had our first version of the software that did virtual unwrapping, and we had examples we had created in the lab that showed the concept from start to finish. And I presented that at the Society of American Archivists, and I actually received from the audience audible gasps when we showed the result. And that was when I knew, this is powerful. In the years that followed, Seales was able to read ancient texts like the Book of Ecclesiastes and the Engedi Scroll. He learned about the Herculaneum Scrolls in 2004 and immediately began trying to virtually unwrap them. In early 2023, Seales and his team had a breakthrough when one of his PhD students confirmed that machine learning could detect ink from the scrolls. I found an article about this computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, Brent Seales, who had this wild plan. Tech investor Nat Friedman had become interested in Seales' work in 2020 when he fell down an ancient Rome rabbit hole during COVID lockdown. This is one of the coolest projects that I've ever heard about, and I want to follow it and see what happens. It reached out to Brent. What if we open up this problem to the world and we engage all the bright minds who I think should be as interested in this as you are and as I feel like I am now? We raised over $1 million, $1.2 million, and suddenly we had a $1.4 million archaeology prize. On March 15th, 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge launched. The grand prize to be awarded to the first person to decode the scrolls is $700,000. The organizers have since awarded 36 intermediate prizes for milestones along the way. And so we put up this first letters prize, and the idea was to find 10 identifiable letters in a four-square-centimeter region of the scroll. And when we put it up, we honestly didn't know if it was possible. I was doing an internship at SpaceX, and I was driving to work in South Texas, and I listened to a Nat Friedman interview. Nat just kind of explains the whole Herculaneum Scrolls thing. He explains the challenge, and at the end, he says, if you're listening, there's a chance you could win. And I was like, holy cow, I have to give this a go. When I started in March, I just wanted to get a good handle on kind of how the challenge works, what the data looks like, and just develop good intuitions there. There was a rare occurrence where I attended a party, and I was just kind of sitting in the corner, and I get a text from one of the people on the segmentation team. Like, hey, I just uploaded this new piece of flattened papyrus. I access my computer from my cell phone and kind of set it to run on this new piece. And then I just put my phone away, don't think about it again. And as I'm walking out of the parking garage to return to my college dorm room, I just pull out my phone again, like, you know, I wonder how that, you know, I wonder how that new segment's doing. And I look at my phone, and there were like three Greek letters there. It was amazing. I completely freaked out. Luke Ferreter, who is winning the first letters prize on behalf of the Vesuvius Challenge. Indeed, thank you. Those letters he managed to uncover show a word translated to mean purple. I just want to read the scrolls. We all just want to read the scrolls as a common catchphrase in the community. Scholars estimate there may be over 30 volumes of text in the unopened Herculaneum Scrolls, covering a wide range of authors and genres. It's pretty intoxicating to sit down and see writing from someone 2,000 years ago that we can just read. I mean, that is just a fantastic feeling.