10 ms·
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
Preprint: https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf
https://github.com/ScrollPrize/villa https://github.com/ScrollPrize/villa
- verditelabs 4mo agoI am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
- helterskelter 4mo agoGiven the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?
- verditelabs 4mo agoThat's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection. For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.
- helterskelter 4mo agoThanks!
- pimlottc 4mo agoDo you think this particular scroll is easier or harder to read that the others will be? Or about average?
- verditelabs 4mo agoPherc1667 was quite small and just so happened to have readable ink, so it was easier than I expect most others to be.
- superjan 4mo agoDo we known what ink is used?
- verditelabs 4mo agoMost of the evidence so far points towards carbon based ink. I am not sure if any of the scrolls we have scanned show strong evidence of iron gall based ink. I know that there are different types and preparation methods for different carbon based inks, but I do not know if it is possible to determine which kind(s) were used solely from inspecting the xrays. I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.
- junon 4mo agoThanks for answering all the questions in here. Fascinating work.
- jimbob45 4mo agoAre the fragments destroyed in ‘69 and ‘80 available to be read similarly? Or were they disposed of?
- verditelabs 4mo agoI am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and/or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.
- adriand 4mo agoWhat are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?
- verditelabs 4mo agoI am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I'm a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.
- arikrahman 4mo agoWell what were your first thoughts when you decoded the script, besides the obvious Eureka, after making some sense of the texts?
- tremon 4mo agoProbably something along the lines of "finally, now it looks like a coherent piece of text. I wonder what it says".
- verditelabs 4mo agoOther members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.
- readthenotes1 4mo agoYour response reminds me of Nigel Richards :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards Congratulations, and thank-you!
- echelon 4mo agoDid anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?
- verditelabs 4mo agoYes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.
- fintechjock 4mo agoI've been on the Discord for a couple of years now, and poking around with submissions as well. Sean and the entire team deserve so much praise for all of this work. It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!
- echelon 4mo agoThat's incredibly impressive. Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.
- tsol 4mo agoHow do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there
- verditelabs 4mo agoI am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.
- matneyx 4mo agoThat last sentence is so perfect, like my dad answering the question of how he lost weight. "I ate less and exercised more."
- tsol 4mo agoVery cool that you got in just through your interests. It's anyways cool to see stories where that works out! Good to know it's possible to get that kind of job
- inglor_cz 4mo agoI don't have any questions, just a comment. You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown. That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that. Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
- Rebelgecko 4mo agoWhat contradictions do you think the scrolls contain?
- inglor_cz 4mo agoI don't have any concrete tips. We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts. BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoNo questions, but I just want to say this is really exciting work!
- Dzugaru 4mo agoOutstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?
- verditelabs 4mo agoYes, it's quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.
- im3w1l 4mo agoWhat is the input to the ML algorithm? Does it know the surrounding context so that it has a chance to deduce "if this stroke is slightly longer then the end result will be idiomatic greek and latin"?
- verditelabs 4mo agoThe input is 3d chunks of reconstructed CT data from our scans. I can't remember the specifics but maybe enough voxels for .5mm^3 at a time or so? They're all available for free from https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum-scrolls/ https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum... . Our trained models are all available at https://huggingface.co/scrollprize https://huggingface.co/scrollprize
- cwnyth 4mo agoNot all machine learning is generative AI.
- mc32 4mo agoTrue but like regular document scanning software there can be errors in detection.
- BiraIgnacio 4mo agoAmazing work, fantastic!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tomcam 4mo agoAbsolutely incredible work. This is one of the most amazing news articles I’ve encountered in decades. Congratulations team!
- temp987 4mo agothis is überragend. by many means!
- 2ap 4mo agoI'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?
- verditelabs 4mo agoI am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of good ground truth, it doesn't matter if your code is perfect, you'll never get results.
- gekoxyz 4mo ago> it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again
- rossdavidh 4mo agoThat is a general truth of most ML; many models _can_ find the information in the data, if the data is good enough. If it is not, then likely no model can.
- EvanAnderson 4mo agoYou brought up what I'm most curious about: Where does the ground truth come from for this work since you can't just to unwrap a scroll to tell if the model got it right or, presumably, make a facsimile scroll and wrap it up.
- verditelabs 4mo agoThe ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of the scroll that are preserved well, but is extremely tedious and slow and error prone. We have a team of annotators who do manual annotation and refinement through custom software we've written, mostly improving on automatically generated segmentations and unwrappings. Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agohow many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount? have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?
- verditelabs 4mo ago30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March. The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls. The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap
- CGMthrowaway 4mo agoYou had to pay? I understand the machine cost many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I would have thought for academic researchers doing open science, the beamtime is free (funded by the govt / science trusts).
- verditelabs 4mo agoThe beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab getting their samples ready. It's a well oiled machine and they've got customers.
- prox 4mo agoWhat other type of stuff gets scanned? I can’t imagine a whole industry waiting to x-ray something?
- CGMthrowaway 4mo ago
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- negergreger 4mo agoHow fast is the process? Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?
- verditelabs 4mo agoWe've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.
- itsthecourier 4mo agomay you please tell us how much effort goes into each type of task in those months? where else do you think these techniques be applied?
- verditelabs 4mo agoWe are a core team of about 10 researchers and developers working full time on work that applies to all of the scrolls. We also ahve 4 full time annotators that tend to work on one scroll at a time. The amount of time spent on any given scroll varies with how difficult and large it is. There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.
- fph 4mo agoRandom shower thought: I wonder if it would be better in the long term to stop digging out archeological findings. The more we excavate, the more damage we do for future archaeologists who will have the superpower of reading these texts without even needing to dig the scrolls free and open them.
- flir 4mo ago
- nkoren 4mo agoMassive kudos to the whole team. I've been waiting 30 years for this announcement, ever since I first heard about the scrolls. Fantastic work!
- dogscatstrees 4mo agoWhat is your origin story? How did you end up doing this and how can I do the same?
- verditelabs 4mo agoBS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.
- Refreeze5224 4mo agoWhat a cool job, and congrats on great work!
- ghghgfdfgh 4mo agoI understand that the complexity of the project has increased over the years. How difficult is it for a newcomer to get into it?
- verditelabs 4mo agoIt has gotten harder, unfortunately. One of the barriers to entry is simply the massive amounts of data; not everyone can set aside $100s worth of HDD or SSD space to play around. That said I have done a lot of work to dramatically reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth needed. We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions. Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc. I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc. For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.
- amluto 4mo agoDo you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it? Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.
- verditelabs 4mo agoYes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink. A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access
- londons_explore 4mo agoI assume that's because the writer probably sometimes shortly after re-inking the writing instrument was putting down a 10x thicker layer...
- amluto 4mo agoWhen you say "physically based rendering" do you mean that one could build a PBR model based on the (unrolled?) xray data, render that model, and be able to see the ink? edit: I found this: https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/segments https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/se... The JSON seems to suggest that I'm mostly looking at ink detection output, but I could easily be using the tool wrong. But I also found this awesome explanation: https://scrollprize.org/data_fragments https://scrollprize.org/data_fragments I guess I bunch of the training was done by using fragments of scrolls where ground truth data is available using IR photography. Also... that xray resolution is absolutely amazing!
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- eboy 4mo ago[dead]
- Izmaki 4mo agoHow awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that. Hats off!
- verditelabs 4mo agoIn March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact. I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished
- _boffin_ 4mo agoI am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work. If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
- verditelabs 4mo agoThe process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work. Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required. A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.
- thom 4mo agoDo we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?
- verditelabs 4mo agoThat varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse. To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.
- ex-aws-dude 4mo agoI'm curious prior to this has there been any research/attempts at chemical methods to strengthen the structure and allow it to be unrolled?
- verditelabs 4mo agoVarious physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and I believe that now only non destructive methods are being employed. For fragments and already shattered and opened, unrolled scrolls a variety of imaging techniques exist and are still being improved upon by teams and research groups we are not associated with. For unrolled scrolls, I believe at this point no one will ever attempt physical unwrapping ever again.
- equalbeforegod 4mo agoWhere are the shattered scrolls? Is there a list somewhere?
- thatoneengineer 4mo agoImagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?
- verditelabs 4mo agoBeats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist. Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
- manbash 4mo agoIt's so humbling to realize that the human mind hasn't changed a lot. Only our environment.
- msuniverse2026 4mo agoHow many more scrolls exist?
- verditelabs 4mo agoThat have been dug up? I think 600 or so still exist. Perhaps about 2000 or so have ever been excavated. We have scanned about 30 of them. Still underground? I've seen various counts. Maybe more than 10000?
- quotemstr 4mo agoShame there's a modern city over most of Herculaneum. I'd love to excavate the remainder. Now that we can read what we find, there's a good scientific reason to do so now instead of waiting.
- mygooch 4mo ago[dead]
- Jeaye 4mo agoI am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent. The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.
- verditelabs 4mo agoI wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well > Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been. A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances. Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me. One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?
- card_zero 4mo ago1. Why is that a realization, are there really people who say "Scandinavians are just mechanical" or "9th century people were made out of wood"? Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset? 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
- gadders 4mo agoThe science to get the text is cool, but where is the best place to read discussion of the text in the scroll, it's context, meaning etc?
- verditelabs 4mo agoThe core challenge team is focused on the technology side to provide the images of ink to our team of papyrologists and they do the transcription, translation, reading, and scholarship. This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .
- Barbing 4mo agoMind-bending achievement from you all - thank you!
- SidewaysView 4mo ago[flagged]
- verditelabs 4mo ago5/7 trolling; not bad
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- SidewaysView 4mo agoYou don't like what I have to say? Fine by me. Guess we'll see.
- verditelabs 4mo agoI can't hear you over all this cool stuff I'm discovering
- SidewaysView 4mo agoI hear Haiti has some pretty cool history too. But I'm sure you've heard it before.
- equalbeforegod 4mo agoCan you tell me how many scrolls there were to begin with, how many have been confirmed to have been lost, and how many could he salvageable if they are in broken / dessicated form? And how many there are left? Thank you so much. :)
- suddenlybananas 4mo agoScrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.
- tokai 4mo agoSure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.
- suddenlybananas 4mo agoOf course! But the title is misleading and gives people the impression that we don't already know the library is just full of Epicurean texts.
- IAmBroom 4mo agoIt's also technically incorrect. The texts have been read; this particular text was read for the first time in the modern era.
- verditelabs 4mo agoI think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.
- dang 4mo agoOk, I've restored the entire title above. Sorry about that! (Btw, you can use the 'edit' link to fix things like this if the software gets a title change wrong.)
- varenc 4mo agoFrom my cursory reading of the pre-print, it didn't seem like the entire scroll has been read? Or rather, you read everything that can be read, but part of the original have been lost? (Like columns 1-4). VERY COOL WORK!
- tokai 4mo agoI'm really hoping that the library contains some lost older Greek works. But its going to be awesome what ever we find.
- helterskelter 4mo agoI'm hoping for a complete(ish) Heraclitus. Also Eratosthenes, whose methods have been described but we don't have the original work where we calculated the circumference of the Earth. Also Hipparchus and Thales.
- annodomini2019 4mo agoMy pick would easily be the missing books of ab urbe condita by Livy, so much early Roman history that would be wonderfully filled out for us
- helterskelter 4mo agoAlso, Aristarchus.
- bobowzki 4mo agoVery impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum. A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?
- cl3misch 4mo agoThe tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...
- verditelabs 4mo agoFortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don't need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.
- roflmaostc 4mo agoI found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for. Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-al_Archiving2017.pdf https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-... So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.
- frollogaston 4mo agoI always wondered about this, how was there not already tech for a liquor store owner to scan all the lottery tickets without scratching them? On the rare occasions I want to buy a lottery ticket, that's one more reason to only do one where I pick the numbers.
- kilroy123 4mo agoFor me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research) I'm kind of obsessed with the ancient world. I dream of being able to read entire pages of new text from ~2,000 years ago.
- xandrius 4mo agoWhat's the most interesting le text from olden times that you would recommend?
- clickety_clack 4mo agoWhen I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”. How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.
- dylan604 4mo agoSending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I'd have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA
- dgellow 4mo agoYou might want to read this: https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...
- frollogaston 4mo agoIt's graffiti though
- djaro 4mo agoSome writers like Martial were pretty much writing mildly entertaining commentary, not much different to social media now.
- colechristensen 4mo agoSometimes there is very little to go on, but we really do have a lot to work with from the late republic and early roman empire. Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet. Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.
- 9dev 4mo agoEvery time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too! There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoThis isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.
- verditelabs 4mo agoThere is a large overlap in what we are doing with the medical field as well. A lot of the segmentation methodology and technology we use and adapt originally came out of the medical field for doing things like brain imaging.
- tayo42 4mo agoWhere are these jobs for non specialist swes?
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoThat's an interesting question, I had not thought about this, but I'm sure they exist. I imagine you'd have to already be a researcher in those fields and have received funding to use AI in your research probably? In some cases they're using things as simple as GPT, but I'm thinking specifically of mathematical breakthroughs of not sure about medical.
- an0malous 4mo agoLLMs or the more general category of AI (machine learning)?
- _verandaguy 4mo agoI imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :) But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.
- josefritzishere 4mo agoThis is huge, we're about to learn so much about ancient texts.
- lanthissa 4mo agoThe person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.
- sevenzero 4mo ago>technology that build the pyramids You mean ropes and carts?
- inglor_cz 4mo agoThe stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
- vitally3643 4mo agoI'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience. Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
- inglor_cz 4mo agoCan experimental archaeology actually replicate this? If not, I don't find the speculation, even though logical, to be conclusive.
- dgellow 4mo agoYes
- vitally3643 4mo ago
- cwillu 4mo agoLink to the image: https://scrollprize.org/img/firstscroll/banner-full.webp https://scrollprize.org/img/firstscroll/banner-full.webp
- INTPenis 4mo agoBut wait, the work seems to be from the 2nd century, but it was buried during the Vesuvius eruption in the 1st century? I love stuff like this because it gives a glimpse into Roman society. To me it seems like they were very similar to us today, forever contemplating learning, existence, gods.
- verditelabs 4mo ago> places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century _BC_. Emphasis mine.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mattbettinson 4mo agoI wonder what the parellel would be 2,000 years for now: A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 4mo agoWe have successfully uncorrupted audiovisual media of what we believe to be an oral retelling of the long lost ending to Chekhov‘s “The Three Sisters.” It turns out the light was on.
- defen 4mo agoIs this a very obscure Norm Macdonald reference?
- Waterluvian 4mo agoNorm? That guy hasn't put out anything new in months.
- asimovDev 4mo agoReally? I didn't know he was sick
- citizenpaul 4mo agoAs I understand it, Pompeii was basically a city of vice and hendoism. Most of the scroll text so far seems to be the ancient version of porn fanfic. So things really never change.
- rzz3 4mo agoSomeone found a fossilized T-shirt that had the DeCSS code on it.
- shevy-java 4mo agoKind of cool. The eruption sort of "froze" some information in time, for later generations to learn from people living ~2000 years in the past.
- yuvrajsa 4mo ago[flagged]
- charcircuit 4mo agoI thought we were able to read some of these scrolls years ago?
- albertgoeswoof 4mo agoYes about 2000 years ago we read many of them, we even wrote some too!
- gitaarik 4mo agoI think some years ago they were starting to be able to read some words
- tern 4mo ago> "…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…" Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.
- proee 4mo agoOnly about 20% of the Herculaneum site has been excavated, so there is high probability that more scrolls exist. The current scrolls were not part of the main library, but more of a private collection at the time. So imagine how cool it would be to find a full library with thousand of scrolls across many different topics, that can now be read with this technology.
- bambax 4mo agoThis could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts. It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them. This could quite literally change everything. [0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-surviving-ancient-writings-in-greek-or-latin/ https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...
- empath75 4mo agoI'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.
- normie3000 4mo ago> we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.
- 4mo ago
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- cortesoft 4mo agoThis is so cool. I feel like it is almost a victory against entropy!
- hasteg 4mo agoSo far this is some of the best uses of ML I've seen to date! This is one of the few things you can point at and say "AI made the world a better place" IMO (this and medical research).
- delusional 4mo agoThat's not true. AI or ML has been used for a long time in hugely useful, although narrow ways. LLM's have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but people used to say that the problem with AI was that it always stopped being called AI once it became useful.
- ur-whale 4mo agoA scroll has been read ... what does it say ?
- HarHarVeryFunny 4mo agoThis is technology verging on witchcraft! Amazing!
- jwitchel 4mo ago"I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this." Fantastic work!
- VoodooJuJu 4mo ago[dead]
- normie3000 4mo agoA Herculaneum effort.
- pacman1337 4mo agoWhere is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.
- lalaland1125 4mo agoBottom of the paper, in the appendix. Don't expect much. They only got fragments of text with a lot of missing words.
- Hugsbox 4mo agoIn other words, the title is incorrect and the "entire" scroll has not been read
- rustymonday 4mo agoWhat remained of the scroll has been read. This scroll was severely damaged in earlier attempts to unroll it.
- varenc 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681663
- cyberpunk 4mo ago> "we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect" - Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}
- thom 4mo ago[dead]
- juliankauai 4mo agoHow long till someone uses the hardware and code to process all the redacted data in the epstein files. Why wait thousands of years?
- codeulike 4mo agoLets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown). Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
- candlemas 4mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ
- tialaramex 4mo ago> Do we have better imaginations? Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls. > Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew? Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results. In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.
- 4mo ago
- sourcecodeplz 4mo ago“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…” “Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…” “…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”
- thewakalix 4mo agoWas this announcement AI-generated?
- empiricus 4mo agoHow much of this work is "with 5 parameters I can fit an elephant"?
- choilive 4mo agoBeen following the vesuvius challenge and to me this is nothing short of alien magic tech. Incredible work.
- yourgooch 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- hermannbjorgvin 4mo agoWhen will the rest be scanned and incorporated into the LLM training corpus?
- yesitcan 4mo agoLet’s normalize not using AI for blog posts. This is cool but I feel like I’m interacting with Claude Code. Em dashes, bolding, “it’s not just x, it’s y”
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tus666 4mo agowhat does it say?
- willmeyers 4mo agoWhat an incredible test against human capability and optimism to preserve them for so long in hopes that we would one day have to tech to read them without destroying them. Stories like these give me a lot of hope for the future.
- janpaul123 4mo agoEx-project lead here. The most incredible part is buried in a 7 hour long video. Last night they also unwrapped 140 columns of new text in the PHerc. Paris. 4 scroll: https://x.com/JanPaul123/status/2070304769273725278 https://x.com/JanPaul123/status/2070304769273725278
- janpaul123 4mo agoAnd a new $1M Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize will be announced in coming days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oTlQm0KBw&t=5405s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oTlQm0KBw&t=5405s
- prox 4mo agoAmazing stuff!
- verditelabs 4mo agoCan't stop Sean from segmenting
- dev1ycan 4mo agoThis is so beautiful in a way, like going back in time and saving someone from dying, their words are now back into history. In a way this is sort of like the reverse of a recently aired anime (Orb: on the movements of the Earth) which talk about the opposite, people whose contributions were erased and we'll never know about them.
- davidw 4mo ago"We've been trying to contact you about your extended chariot warranty"
- varenc 4mo agoIt's false that the 'entire Herculaneum scroll has been read'. Much of the scroll has been lost. From the preprint, columns 1-4 lost, and then margins on other columns are also lost. Col. 5: "… the similar …" Col. 6: "… impulses …" Col. 9: "… so far as … this or to have … that …" Col. 10: "… that befits on the whole still … there will be fear and … the great and long …" Col. 11: "… and the impulse … For/towards each of these things in this way … we are by nature … and for/towards the fulfillment of these things that … seem …" Col. 12: "… to men and beasts … And above all, each of the most common things constitutes these … For, [necessity? necessary?] …" Col. 13: "… natural … therefore also … according to the … this … will be found, and lives will make no progress whatsoever, as we have no need for either pleasure or pain. In the same way, also …" Col. 14: "… and thus lacking … I want to say … common … accomplished … to lack … and … on the right parts towards the left ones. There is an excess in the impulse …" Col. 15: "… and of all similar things. For, according to this kind/category, according to which impulses exist by nature, there will be that which lacks nothing, so that one seeks nothing more, but completes in every respect as …" Col. 16: "… they approach completion. Moving from these things to … [λόγος?], it [τέχνη?] accomplishes within us all that pertains to it, even though it cannot fully complete nature. And it allowed …" Col. 17: "… we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect…" Col. 18: "… being that practical wisdom … and to be about it. This [sc. λόγος] concerning the mechanical arts seems to me to be very distant from such a [conception?], and to have the technical fulfilment that is, so to speak, lame and something of such type lacking, and concerning the …" Col. 19: "… need none. Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect, accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they …" Col. 20: "… to happen. And such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good—let alone beautiful—nor anything bad—let alone ugly—nor happiness …" Col. 21: "… being greatly wise and celebrated and … to praise … as according to the eulogies …" Col. 22: "… still … Aristocreon … to possessed things …"
- ios-contractor 4mo agoDidn't they watch enough Mummy movies to know not to do that
- yashthakker 4mo ago[dead]
- kstenerud 4mo ago> PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm. I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...
- PMunch 4mo agoPretty sure it wasn't just some guy who figured "I could totally do that" and was allowed to give it a go. Rather it was probably a scientific study like the current efforts, using the best tools available at the time. In 1969 humanity sent people to the moon, and we can't even unroll some old scrolls? It's hard to know, when you're there, whether technology has gotten good enough to do something or if it isn't. EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources: > In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent. > The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the "peeling" and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state. So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I'm not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn't figure out if it was open to the public anywhere. Another interesting part: > In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team. So it's not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.
- cl3misch 4mo agoPress release from ESRF: https://www.esrf.fr/home/news/general/content-news/general/the-day-the-herculaneum-scrolls-began-speaking-again.html https://www.esrf.fr/home/news/general/content-news/general/t...
- ricardobayes 4mo agoLooks like it's some phylosophical rambling, I can imagine the dudes sitting in their mediterranean garden and theoretizing about life. It's practically the Reddit post of 200BC.
- jareklupinski 4mo agoin a few thousand years someone will figure out how to undo all the reddit comment scrambling scripts people ran during the apipocalypse and have a similar renaissance
- spelufo 4mo agoSo cool! Congratulations to the team. When scroll 4 (PHerc 1667) was first published, it was clear that the sheets were less compressed than the first two scrolls, so it would be easier to segment the surface. However, the whole surface looked similar to what the ink had looked like in scroll 1 where letters were first discovered. But the team persevered and scanned at higher resolutions and eventually found letters: https://scrollprize.substack.com/p/finallyletters-in-scroll-4 https://scrollprize.substack.com/p/finallyletters-in-scroll-... Now they've managed to bring out the ink across the whole scroll. Truly inspiring, can't wait to read up on how they did it.
- gabrieledarrigo 4mo agoWas this page human-written, or AI-generated?
- hn_0206ltb 4mo ago[dead]
- Tepix 4mo agoWhat if we want to put something on paper today for it to survive as long as possible? 1-minute research: Paper: 100% cotton rag or linen rag paper with alkaline reserve. Acid-free and lignin-free. Ink: Genuine carbon ink applied with a classic dip pen. Storage: ISO 16245 archival box, Less than 15°C, 30-50% humidity, dark, no oxygen exchange. Always store horizontally. Wear white 100% cotton gloves. Printing: If you want to print instead of hand-write: Piezography carbon printing or pigment-based inks used by professional desktop photo printers, matte black or photo black ink, printed on digital Fine Art Archival Paper. Place a single sheet of archival-grade tissue paper or glassine paper between every single page of your document I think the key is to write something interesting that's worth preserving. That may be the most difficult part. Any improvements beyond this?
- fluoridation 4mo agoInstead of pigmenting the paper, punch holes through it. Then you're relying on the physical durability of a single substance, instead of two.
- Tepix 4mo agoInteresting. Reminds me of this gaston cartoon (at 5:51) https://youtu.be/OqIjS7Yb8y8 https://youtu.be/OqIjS7Yb8y8
- 28304283409234 4mo ago> sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end. Take that, floppydisk!
- hn_5063xaw 4mo ago[dead]
- quertyrecord74 4mo agoWhats the message in it. Can't find link to it.
- manigu 4mo agohttps://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf#page=22 https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf#page=22 Pages 22-27
- melicerte 4mo agoDid anyone notice that anonymous donators[1] have the picture of Larry David, and the link points to the Curb Your Enthusiasm - Anonymous Donor Pt2[2] episode? So geeky, so cool ! - [1] https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors - [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y
- verifex 4mo agoThat is a nice easter egg!
- vladar107 4mo ago270 years sitting in a museum and ML cracks it in a few years. Makes you wonder how many other 'unreadable' artifacts are just waiting for the right model."
- javascripthater 4mo ago[dead]
- parsabg 4mo agoI'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving. We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal. Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.
- verditelabs 4mo agoYou'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/ https://www.deeppast.org/ We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.
- parsabg 4mo agoGreat that this exists, and a shame that it'll probably never get a similar level of attention from funders, participants, or the press.
- dcminter 4mo agoWhy not both? But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history. Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)
- parsabg 4mo agoIt is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn't forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity. Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them. It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.
- kevinten10 4mo ago[flagged]
- fssys 4mo agoamazing work deserves much better than this dreadful llm write up!
- swordlucky666 4mo ago[flagged]
- warumdarum 4mo agoThe anti-dig faction of the archelogy internal war grows ever bolder and cursive.
- jaycarter 4mo ago[dead]
- NoSalt 4mo agoIf this doesn't make you think of Star Trek, I don't know what does. I can imagine the amateur archeologist, Picard himself, asking La Forge to read this fragile piece of history, and Geordi coming up with something just like this. Yes, I still have hope for humanity, and a future like Star Trek.
- dr_dshiv 4mo agoIf it is helpful, I produced a collection of translated books documenting previous physical unrolling efforts: https://sourcelibrary.org/collections/herculaneum-papyri https://sourcelibrary.org/collections/herculaneum-papyri This may be interesting if you are curious about what Philodemos wrote — or how previous generations of scholars approached the work. Great work everyone!
- throwaway81523 4mo agoI wonder if soon the post office will scan everyone's letters and copy their text without opening the envelopes. They already photograph the front and back of every piece of mail.
- _giorgio_ 3mo agoNobody talks about the content, so the content is zero.
- cben 3mo agoThis is a stunning achievement for many reasons! Having been born in USSR, a particular reason it moves me to tears how this vindicates Bulgakov's famous "manuscripts don't burn", which he presented as a plain metaphysical fact: "Unfortunately I cannot show it to you," replied the master, "because I burned it in my stove." "I'm sorry but I don't believe you," said Woland. "You can't have done. Manuscripts don't burn." He turned to his cat. "Come on, Behemoth, let us have the novel." – towards the end of The Master and Margarita. In the battle against both censorship & entropy, recovering a 2kyo text which was considered forever lost is an incredible victory.