AI reads old document - 4th March 2024

Before paper, people wrote on long rolls of papyrus. The name for a long roll of papyrus is a scroll. Three students read part of a very old scroll. They won a $700,000 prize.

No one can open the scroll. It’s completely burned. 2,000 years ago, the volcano Vesuvius burned the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The document was in Herculaneum.

The team was Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger. They worked together online. They used AI (artificial intelligence) to read the scroll.

The Vesuvius Challenge started in 2023. The competition shared CT scans of the scroll. It offered $1 million in prizes. First, Farritor read one word: ‘porphyras’. This means purple in ancient Greek.

Then, Farritor worked together with Nader and Schilliger. Their AI program read 2000 letters. This was five percent of the scroll. It was about music, food and drink.

The next competition is to read 90 percent of four scrolls. The information in the scrolls may change history!