A 21-year-old computer science student has won a global competition where participants competed to decipher the first text from a charred scroll found in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman city. This scroll was completely charred due to the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The achievements of this student open the possibility of understanding hundreds of texts from the only intact library that has survived from ancient Rome.
Luke Farritor, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, developed a machine learning algorithm, which has managed to detect Greek letters in several lines of the battered scroll. To do this, Farritor used small-scale differences in the texture of the parchment and trained his neural network with them.
After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, hundreds of scrolls were buried under 20 meters of volcanic ash. The initial attempts to open the scrolls almost caused their disintegration, and many scholars feared that the remaining documents could never be unrolled or read.
The Vesuvius Challenge offers a series of recognitions, including a cash prize of $700,000. To receive it, the participant must decipher four or more passages from some of the rolled scrolls. On October 12th, it was announced that Farritor had won one of the prizes, $40,000. Thanks to his invention, more than 10 characters have been read on a surface of papyrus as small as 4 square centimeters.
Until now, researchers had to rely on the study of open scrolls. However, the more than 600 scrolls preserved in the National Library of Naples, the United Kingdom, and France, remain unopened.
