AI works out secrets of ancient scroll - 4th March 2024

A team of 3 students are celebrating a $700,000 prize win after restoring part of an ancient scroll using artificial intelligence (AI). Being able to read the scroll’s secrets appeared impossible since the papyrus had been burnt during a volcanic eruption and would crumble into pieces if unrolled.

The winners, Egyptian PhD candidate, Youssef Nader, SpaceX intern Luke Farritor from the US and robotics student Julian Schilliger from Switzerland, teamed up online. They restored 5 percent of the ancient Greek written on the 2,000 year old document.

The scroll is one of 600 discovered in the 18th century in a Herculaneum villa. The city, alongside Pompeii, had been devastated when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, covering both cities in ash and lava.

The Vesuvius Challenge, established in 2023, pledged a million dollars in prizes to those who succeeded in revealing the scroll’s secrets. Sparking interest among the global AI community, the organisers supplied CT scans of the scrolls from which participants created 3D models. However, the scans lacked details such as colour, meaning that participants needed another method for identifying ink marks.

The breakthrough came when one participant discovered a crackling pattern on one segment. Others then trained AI algorithms to identify the crackles elsewhere.

Eventually, Farritor discovered a word, ‘porphyras’ or purple, then partnered with Nader and Schilliger, working long hours, to decipher over 2000 letters. Nader explained that “The adrenaline rush is what kept us going.”

Their efforts revealed five percent of that text’s content, which focused on pleasure, comparing music to food and drink. Organisers called it “a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.”

Following this success, the organisers have issued a new challenge: to read 90 percent of four scanned scrolls.

Expert in antiquity Robert Fowler highlighted that the texts “could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world.”