Sure, AI robots may very eventually rule the world, but at least we can read a few letters written on papyrus 2,000 years ago!
Ancient library scrolls of the Herculaneum that were ruined by Mount Vesuvius' volcanic eruption in Pompeii in 79 A.D. have now been made readable, albeit partially, with the help of artificial intelligence (AI), National Geographic reports:
The roughly 1,800 unearthed papyrus scrolls — believed to contain literary and philosophical works from the first and second centuries B.C. — had been reduced to brittle, charred lumps by the heat and gasses of the eruption. And those carbonized scrolls that workers didn't throw away more than 250 years ago have largely languished since then in storerooms, written off as unreadable curiosities.
Thankfully, no one threw away those charred scrolls!
Silicon Valley investors Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman created the Vesuvius Challenge earlier this year, offering up to $1 million in cash prizes to anyone that could program AI to read carbonized papyrus from the Herculaneum -- the largest known (and surviving) library from antiquity. Roughly 2,000 contestants are participating in the challenge.
"We've seen 10 or 20 person-years of work from these competitors," said computer scientist Brent Seales, who has sought to decipher text from the Herculaneum for 20 years. "Some people might think, ‘What are you going to all that trouble for?' but I don't believe that. This is an amazing period in human history. We're talking about more works from that period."
Perhaps the craziest thing about this is that the AI is able to read the text without it even being unrolled, thereby preserving the otherwise delicate scroll.
With this achievement, scientists say they are now one step closer to being able to read full passages and — someday — entire scrolls that had previously been considered unreadable.
Imagine what this advancement could mean for how we review all kinds of ancient manuscripts, including even biblical text!
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PS: If you're intrigued by the topic of textual criticism, I highly recommend this excellent feature length documentary on New Testament manuscripts, called Fragments of Truth (narrated by John Rhys-Davies who plays Gimli in the Lord of the Rings movies)!
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