3 researchers translates 2,000-year-old charred scroll using AI

A $700,000 reward was awarded to three researchers who successfully used artificial intelligence to decipher a 2,000-year-old scroll that had been burned during Mount Vesuvius' eruption. The "Vesuvius Challenge" organisers claim that the Herculaneum papyri are made up of about 800 rolled-up Greek scrolls that were carbonised after the volcanic explosion in 79 CE that destroyed the ancient Roman town of Pompeii.

The scrolls, which are housed at the National Library of Naples and the Institut de France in Paris, resemble logs of hardened ash. Attempts to roll them open have resulted in significant damage and even crumbling.

Alternatively, the Vesuvius Challenge offered one million dollars distributed among several awards to encourage research and performed high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls. The trio who won the prize was composed of Youssef Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.

The group used AI to help distinguish ink from papyrus and work out the faint and almost unreadable Greek lettering through pattern recognition.

"Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world," Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society,said.

The challenge required researchers to decipher four passages of at least 140 characters, with at least 85 percent of characters recoverable. Jointly, their efforts have now decrypted about five percent of the scroll, according to the organizers.

The scroll's author was "probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus," writing "about music, food, and how to enjoy life's pleasures," wrote contest organizer Nat Friedman on X.

The scrolls were found in a villa thought to be previously owned by Julius Caesar's patrician father-in-law, whose mostly unexcavated property held a library that could contain thousands more manuscripts.

The contest was the brainchild of Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Friedman, the founder of Github, a software and coding platform that was bought by Microsoft.

The recovery of never-seen ancient texts would be a huge breakthrough: according to data from the University of California, Irvine, only an estimated 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts have survived.