In 79 AD, the Roman city of Pompeii was buried under a 20-metre-high layer of hot rock and ash by the erupting Mount Vesuvius. The inhabitants had no chance to escape and died on the spot. The rediscovery of the city gave us a fascinating insight into people’s lives. Graffiti, food remains, mosaics, tools and cavities in the ashes, which were created where people had huddled and could no longer escape, bear witness to the life, work and death of the Pompeians and allow us to empathize with them 2,000 years later.
The nearby villa district in Herculaneum was also buried. One find was of particular interest to archaeologists: the Villa dei Papiri contained a private collection of scrolls, hundreds of them in fact. These were charred by the ash, but not completely destroyed, posing a challenge to the researchers. They could not be unrolled without falling apart.
It was only with new methods such as scanners that use X-rays and other wavelengths that the mystery of what texts were on these scrolls was solved. Layer by layer, each roll can be scanned and show the differences in the transmittance and reflection of the waves where ink was applied to the papyrus. But this is not the end of the reading process.
And it was precisely for this purpose that the Vesuvius Challenge was launched, with a prize money of one million dollars, to encourage participants in this competition to decipher the remains of the Herculanean papyri using machine learning and computer vision. I wrote about this in my book Kreative Intelligenz from November 2023. And two months after the publication of my book, the big breakthrough came in this competition: the first 15 pages of text were completely deciphered.
Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000 years, we can finally read the scrolls:
This image was produced by @Youssef_M_Nader, @LukeFarritor, and @JuliSchillij, who have now won the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000. Congratulations!!
These fifteen columns come from the very end of the first scroll we have been able to read and contain new text from the ancient world that has never been seen before. The author – probably Epicurean philosopher Philodemus – writes here about music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures. In the closing section, he throws shade at unnamed ideological adversaries – perhaps the stoics? – who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular.”
This year, the Vesuvius Challenge continues. The text that we revealed so far represents just 5% of one scroll.
In 2024, our goal is to from reading a few passages of text to entire scrolls, and we’re announcing a new $100,000 grand prize for the first team that is able to read at least 90% of all four scrolls that we have scanned.
The scrolls stored in Naples that remain to be read represent more than 16 megabytes of ancient text. But the villa where the scrolls were found was only partially excavated, and scholars tell us that there may be thousands more scrolls underground. Our hope is that the success of the Vesuvius Challenge catalyzes the excavation of the villa, that the main library is discovered, and that whatever we find there rewrites history and inspires all of us.
This is just the beginning, because as mentioned, it is assumed that there are thousands more scrolls in the parts of the villa that have not yet been excavated. The scrolls could contain known but lost texts as well as completely unknown texts. For every archaeologist and every book lover, this is a find of the century, and the opportunity to decipher texts that have not been read for 2000 years and make them accessible again.
A little anecdote in passing: the builder of the Villa dei Papiri is thought to be a certain Lucius Calpurnius Piso, who is better known as the father-in-law of Gaius Iulius Caesar – yes, Caesar! – is known.
Here is more about my book, in which I have already written about the Vesuvius Challenge:
KREATIVE INTELLIGENZ
Über ChatGPT hat man viel gelesen in der letzten Zeit: die künstliche Intelligenz, die ganze Bücher schreiben kann und der bereits jetzt unterstellt wird, Legionen von Autoren, Textern und Übersetzern arbeitslos zu machen. Und ChatGPT ist nicht allein, die KI-Familie wächst beständig. So malt DALL-E Bilder, Face Generator simuliert Gesichter und MusicLM komponiert Musik. Was erleben wir da? Das Ende der Zivilisation oder den Beginn von etwas völlig Neuem? Zukunftsforscher Dr. Mario Herger ordnet die neuesten Entwicklungen aus dem Silicon Valley ein und zeigt auf, welche teils bahnbrechenden Veränderungen unmittelbar vor der Tür stehen.