Thanks to artificial intelligence, scientists are finally able to read a cache of scrolls cremated during the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79, but to decipher the entire manuscripts, a team led by the computer scientist of the University of Kentucky Brent Seales is offering $250,000 to anyone who can help with the daunting task.
Seales is the principal investigator of a project that developed an AI system powered by a trained machine learning algorithm to identify ink on charred rollers. Using high-resolution X-ray images of the documents, the AI can spot letters and symbols written on the fire-damaged texts without attempting to open the fragile scrolls.
For the Vesuvius Challenge contest, participants will have access not only to the 3D X-ray images of the scrolls, but also to the AI software that holds the key to extracting their secrets. Sharing the technology Seales’ team has built will help them step up the task of extracting the hidden layers of text from these writings.
“We showed how to read Herculaneum ink,” Seales told the Guardian. “It gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80% of the entire collection. We’ve built the boat. Now we want everyone on board and sailing with us.
Brent Seales, director of the Digital Restoration Initiative at the University of Kentucky, examines a piece of Herculaneum scroll which was scanned at Diamond Light Source in Didcot, west London. Photo by Geoff Caddick/AFP via Getty Images.
Archaeologists recovered the charred remains of the ancient library of Epicurean philosophical texts in 1752, from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, near the Bay of Naples. (The house, believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, is the inspiration for the Getty Villa in Malibu.)
For centuries, the contents of the scrolls remained a mystery, as the deployment of the fragile documents would have destroyed them.
A 2,000 year old Herculaneum scroll. Photo by the Digital Restoration Initiative.
Now, if all goes according to plan, people will have the chance to read these charred Greek texts – some may also be written in Latin – for the first time since the fateful eruption that buried Pompeii.
Scientists have already made similar breakthroughs such as using algorithms to read 300 years, delicately folded letters with paper locks. (They also used CT scans to digitally unwrap an ancient mummy.)
A papyrus fragment from the collection of the Institut de France. Photo of the Vesuvius Challenge.
With the library of Herculaneum, scientists have already identified Greek letters and symbols on the scrolls using infrared images and started to decipher the text. The competition concerns two intact scrolls from the Institut de France. For training purposes, participants can also analyze images of three tiny papyrus fragments where the ink is already visible.
There are 14,000 ultra-high resolution .tif images of the two scrolls – each individual centimeter is captured in approximately 1,250 scans. The researchers took all the scans using a Diamond Light Source particle accelerator, at a resolution of 8 µm (micrometers).
A view of the ruins of Herculaneum, in the background Mount Vesuvius in Herculaneum, Italy in March 2003. Photo by Eric Vandeville/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
To win the $150,000 prize, you just need to be the first to read all four text passages from the scrolls. The competition runs until the end of the year and also offers an additional $100,000 for ink detection on 3D scans.
“A human can’t detect that with their eyes,” Seales said. “The ink fills in the gaps that otherwise create an embossed pattern of the papyrus fibers. This pattern is coated and filled in and I think this subtle change is what is learned.
See a video of one of the scroll scans below.
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