2023-10-19 05:56:44
This is a promising historic step forward: a 2,000-year-old papyrus could be partly deciphered thanks to artificial intelligence. The parchment was charred after the eruption of Vesuvius, which destroyed the Roman city of Herculaneum, in 79 AD and cannot be opened, because it is too damaged. It was therefore necessary to try to read through.
It’s the Vesuvius project, launched by Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky, who has been working for 20 years on how to read the oldest papyri that are too fragile to unroll. He has developped a scanner capable of capturing tiny differences in texture that allow you to see areas inside the rollers where there is ink, a scanner to which he added an algorithmwho teaches him to read this ink, to decipher it.
A single word deciphered after years of research
Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska, improved this artificial intelligence for months after applying for the competition launched by Brent Seales. His work paid off on August 10 when he learned that he had just deciphered the word “porphyras”, which means purple, in Greek. A major discovery for which he won a prize of 40,000 dollars.
In a video he explains how things happened: “One Saturday evening, very late, I was at a party, I received a message from a Vesuvius Challenge colleague who said: ‘We just received this new papyrus ç“Looks interesting, it has the patterns we talked about.” I thought that looked interesting. I sat in the corner with my phone and sent a message: please run the algorithm on this coin. Then I turned off my phone and moved on. ” He recounts the following: “I get home, around 1 a.m., I turn my phone back on and I see letters in Greek appear on the screen, not as clearly as that, but I see them.” He explains that he almost fainted and almost cried with joy.
Emotion also from Professor Brent Seales, who affirms in this same video that “one of the most eminent papyrologists in the world will read this document which people thought was not possible to read because it was too difficult to extract the text. And today, we are talking about this text.”
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