The Vesuvius Challenge, which offers a series of awards for reading passages from a rolled-up scroll, announced that Farritor won the ‘first letters’ prize of $40,000 for reading more than 10 characters in a 4-square-centimetre area of papyrus. The grand prize of $700,000 is for reading four or more passages from a rolled-up scroll, with the deadline set for 31 December. The challenge is part of a broader shift in which artificial intelligence is increasingly aiding the study of ancient texts.
Key takeaways:
- A 21-year-old computer science student, Luke Farritor, has won a global contest to read the first text inside a carbonized scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, unreadable since a volcanic eruption in AD 79.
- Farritor developed a machine-learning algorithm that detected Greek letters on several lines of the rolled-up papyrus, using differences in surface texture to train his neural network and highlight the ink.
- The Vesuvius Challenge offers a series of awards, including a main prize of US$700,000 for reading four or more passages from a rolled-up scroll. Farritor won the 'first letters' prize of $40,000 for reading more than 10 characters in a 4-square-centimetre area of papyrus.
- The breakthrough could revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history and literature, as the Herculaneum library contains works not known from any other sources, direct from the authors.