Three researchers won a $700,000 prize on Monday for using artificial intelligence to decipher a small portion of the nearly 2,000-year-old manuscript scrolls that were severely damaged by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.
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The Herculaneum Papyri consist of around 800 scrolls that were charred in that eruption that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum, according to competition organizers.
The scrolls resemble charred tree trunks and are kept at the Institut de France in Paris and the National Library in Naples. They crumble and can be easily damaged when trying to unroll them.
The competition, called the Vesuvius Challenge, was created by Brent Seales, a computer science researcher at the University of Kentucky in the US, and Nat Friedman, the founder of the Github platform, now owned by Microsoft.
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Organizers had previously scanned four scrolls and offered a total reward of $1 million to anyone who could decipher at least 85% of four 140-character passages.
The trio awarded the “Vesuvius Challenge” consists of Youssef Nader, a doctoral student in Berlin, Luke Farritor, a student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska in the USA, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.
In particular, they used artificial intelligence to distinguish ink from papyrus and determined the nature of Greek characters by detecting repetition.
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Using this technique, Luke Farritor had decoded the first word of a passage, the Greek word for purple.
According to the organizers, their combined efforts have now deciphered around 5% of a scroll. According to Nat Friedman, the author was “probably the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus,” who wrote “about food, music, and the joys of life.”
Some historians believe that these documents once belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father of Calpurnia, one of Julius Caesar's wives. The “Papyrus Villa” where the scrolls were found in the 18th century is still mostly buried and may contain several thousand more manuscripts.
“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of important periods of antiquity,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
Deciphering these texts could actually represent a major breakthrough: According to an inventory by the University of California at Irvine, only 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts would have survived into modern times.