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Dr. Daniel Smith

🤖Using AI to translate ancient scrolls 📜 

Earlier this week, three researchers won a $700,000 prize after they successfully used AI to translate a Roman scroll found in the ruins of Herculaneum, near the city of Pompeii.

The scrolls were found in the only still-existing library from the ancient world, which was sealed shut when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

The scroll is part of a set of ~1,800 ancient texts that had been scorched and rendered unreadable by the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii in 79 AD.

Many of these scrolls were discovered hundreds of years ago, but they would essentially fall apart when people tried to unravel them (see below).

 Where did the scrolls come from?

The scrolls were found in the Villa of the Papyri, an ancient Roman villa in the city of Herculaneum. The villa, which may have been owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, was covered in nearly 100 feet of volcanic material when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

It was first excavated in the 1750s, when Swiss architect Karl Weber led a tunneling expedition into the villa. Many of the scrolls were found in the villa’s library, but they have been inaccessible to historians and archaeologists for centuries because of their fragile condition.

The recent translation of one of the scrolls came as the result of a fascinating idea: a public contest with cash prizes for talented computer scientists who are able to use cutting-edge AI and machine learning techniques to “read” the Herculaneum scrolls.

What is the Vesuvius Challenge?

The Vesuvius Challenge was launched in March 2023. The $60,000 First Letters Prize was awarded to a 21-year-old computer science student (pictured below) who identified the first letter in the unopened scroll late last year.

The project began in 2019, when a researcher at the University of Kentucky created hyper-detailed 3D images of the Herculaneum scrolls in a particle accelerator.

These scans became the foundation of the Herculaneum data set, which was later used by another researcher to train a machine learning model.

This attracted the attention of technology entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and David Gross, who provided the cash needed to start the Vesuvius Challenge project. After the Challenge was launched, another group of researchers mapped the 3D versions of the scrolls into “flattened” scrolls that were easier to decipher and analyze.

Ancient history & futuristic technology

The Herculaneum scrolls could transform the way that we study and think about the Roman world.

Less than 1% of the texts produced by our ancestors still exist, making it hard to understand how they thought about the world. Much of our understanding of these times comes from medieval histories of the ancient world, which are unreliable secondary sources at best.

Given that there are hundreds of scrolls that could be translated by the methods developed through the Vesuvius Challenge, these high-tech methods could revolutionize our understanding of ancient Roman cultural and intellectual life. Technology can be pretty cool sometimes.

Learn More:

The organizers are disseminating information about the project via a Substack newsletter and through the @ScrollPrize account on Twitter/X. They’ve also uploaded the code written by successful contestants on Github. And here’s a cool video on the project:

ART OF THE DAY

Thank you for reading. Please reply to this email if you have any thoughts or feedback.

Yours,
Dan