Artificial intelligence is helping to solve an ancient mystery from the Roman Empire. It involves scrolls from a library that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD.

Mount Vesuvius

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Artificial intelligence is playing a pivotal role in solving a long-standing mystery involving papyrus scrolls from a Roman library buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Discovered in Herculaneum, these scrolls were carbonized and previously impossible to unroll without destroying them. Recent advances, including the use of a particle accelerator and AI to detect faint ink, have allowed researchers to virtually 'unwrap' the scrolls and begin reading their contents.

A global competition, the Vesuvius Challenge, incentivized breakthroughs in this field, with college students successfully extracting words from a scroll for the first time. The texts, including reflections by the philosopher Philodemus, mark a significant step forward in the study of ancient literature. With hundreds more scrolls remaining, further discoveries are anticipated as technology continues to advance.

AI helping to solve ancient mystery involving Mount Vesuvius

It all started with a volcano. When Vesuvius erupted in the year 79 A.D., it not only wiped out Pompeii and the people who lived there, but also the nearby town of Herculaneum. That's where we got a rare look, a guided tour, if you will, deep beneath the surface of the villa that used to be here, one of the most sumptuous of the Roman world. Now we are in the so-called library. Archaeologists in the 18th century found these, 1,800 papyrus scrolls, the only ancient library in the world that's still intact. There was just one problem. It was carbonized. Attempts to unravel the scrolls ended in ashes, says Professor Brent Seals, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky. People didn't understand what they had. So some scrolls were actually thrown away or burned, and you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Only now, at the National Library of Naples, thanks to 21st century technology, can we finally peek inside, leaving Humpty Dumpty unscathed. I thought to myself, if you can use that technology to see noninvasively, right, inside a human body, why can't we see everything inside an artifact, like a scroll? That technology involved a particle accelerator in England. Later, scientists produced light that was 10 billion times brighter than the sun, acting like an X-ray. AI was then used to identify ink, no matter how faint. But they still needed good old-fashioned humans to decipher what those letters mean. To scale this Herculean effort, Seals launched the Vesuvius Challenge, a global competition offering $700,000 in prize money. Three college students took it home, making history by being the first to extract words from a carbonized scroll, nearly 2,000 years old, that had been virtually unwrapped, reflections by the philosopher Philodemus. As, too, in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant. With hundreds more scrolls to go, Seals has launched a second phase of the competition. With AI-inspired methods that are going to usher in, you know, new results that we've not dreamed of. I don't think Renaissance is too strong a word. Who knows, he muses. The Renaissance was, after all, epitomized by our rediscovery of antiquity and humanism. And consider this. Archaeologists have only just begun to scratch the surface. Could there be more out there? Well, I believe that the Villa of the Papyri, which has not been fully excavated, stands a really, really high chance of producing more books. But so much remains for us to discover.

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AI helping to solve ancient mystery involving Mount Vesuvius

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