21-Year-Old Wins $40K After Using AI to Read First Word on 2,000-Year-Old Papyrus Scroll

A University of Nebraska undergraduate student made history by using artificial intelligence to read part of a 2,000-year-old scroll.

Luke Farritor was the first person to decipher a word from ancient scrolls as part of the Vesuvius Challenge. The Vesuvius Challenge is a competition for people to use modern technology to decipher the secrets of ancient rolled papyrus scrolls that came from an ancient library in the Roman city of Herculaneum and were fossilized as a result of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. into carbon and are incredibly fragile.

On Thursday, the Vesuvius Challenge announced during a press conference that a 21-year-old computer science student had won the $40,000 “First Letters” prize after successfully deciphering and reading more than 10 characters in a 4-square-centimeter area of ​​the scroll.

Luke Farritor with the unopened Herculaneum Scroll.

Challenge Vesuvius

The winner of the contest, who is a student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, was inspired by previous work by another contestant, Casey Handmer, which built on research by professor Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky’s EduceLab, according to the Vesuvius Challenge website. According to Nature, Farritor developed a machine learning algorithm that he used to eventually figure out the number of letters on the scroll. The word he discovered was “Porphyras,” which means “purple,” according to the Vesuvius Challenge website.

Farritor became the first competitor to submit the required number of legible letters to the competition. During the press conference, he shared his excitement about the initial moment of spotting the letters.

“I saw these letters and I just freaked out,” Farritor said. – I squinted, I almost fell, I almost cried.

“I took a screenshot. I immediately sent it to JP Posma, who sent it to everyone else. I sent it to my family. My mom called and said, ‘Hey, it’s like this is the first thing you’ve sent me that actually looks like letters. This is really cool,’ he explained.

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Farritor discovered this late one night and said he knew he needed to “improve” the photo. “I was like … let’s keep going until we get to something that looks a lot like the picture you see today,” he said.

Since Farritor was the first to report his discoveries, he was awarded the top prize, however, the runner-up, Youssef Nader, also discovered the word in the same area and was awarded a cash prize of $10,000.

Farritor used artificial intelligence to read the letters from the Herculaneum scrolls because they were considered too fragile to develop and, according to the Vesuvius Challenge website, would “turn to dust” if handled improperly.

Federica Nicolardi, a paper scientist at the University of Naples and a member of the academic committee that reviewed Farritor’s findings, told Nature that the objects were “crazy” and “all crumpled and crushed.”

A 2,000-year-old scroll of papyrus buried by Mount Vesuvius.

EduceLab/University of Kentucky

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The fragility of the scrolls is a result of the fact that they date back to AD 79, after Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Pompeii in Italy. The Somma stratovolcano triggered mudslides that covered the city of Herculaneum with more than 65 feet of volcanic ash, Nature reports.

As a result of the volcanic eruption, the heat transformed hundreds of papyrus scrolls from the Herculaneum library into fossilized pieces of carbon, the paper said. For the next 1700 years, the scrolls were buried in the mud, until 1752 when they were finally dug up.

University of Kentucky EduceLab researchers.

EduceLab/University of Kentucky

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Nicolardi told Nature that Farritor’s discovery “was such a dream.” She added, “I can actually see something from inside the scroll.”

She also said she believes that soon paper scientists will be able to read the document and that this will start a “great revolution”.

Thea Sommerschield, a historian of ancient Greece and Rome at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, explained to Nature that this discovery could “revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history and literature.

Although Farritor was able to decode this, there are still several unread scrolls. As a result, the Vesuvius Challenge challenged researchers to read four passages in two scanned scrolls to win a top prize of $700,000.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education