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The Vesuvius Challenge

scrollprize.org

184 pointsbenbreen32 comments

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Some background:

>if read, [the scrolls] would more than double the corpus of literature we have from antiquity

And that's just with the ~600 scrolls that have been excavated so far:

>excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground

And, as for the content of the scrolls:

>[at least some of the scrolls] contain philosophical texts written in Greek

>>[at least some of the scrolls] contain philosophical texts written in Greek

Let's not get our hopes too high. It could be something really mundane (for the time) but as they say "One man's trash is another man's treasure".

The ability to read such a thing is probably going to be the most invaluable part of this.

Hi folks, I'm the co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. We now have nearly $1.5M in prizes, thanks to a lot of amazing sponsors. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.

One of the worries I have is that the grand prize is so top weighted. It feels daunting to want to attempt to work on something like this if there's only one winner. If my team isn't the first to win it, but we contribute an interesting method, the most we can get is a 2000$ open source prize?

We're thinking about this too. The overall prize pool was about 6x smaller a week ago so we are still digesting this rapid influx of sponsorship.

The grand prize goes to the _first_ team to read 4 passages from the scrolls. But we could, for example, award something to the second team to do so. Or, we could award something to the team that reads the _most_ passages by the end of the year.

We deliberately did not allocate all of the recent sponsorships to the grand prize so we can solve for this exact challenge. So, we have about $500k in unallocated prize money, and might use a good chunk of it towards something like this. We're open to ideas, and consulting with experts from Xprize etc.

Will all future scans of the papyrii be uploaded for anyone to analyse?

Anyone got any preliminary results to show?

I was playing around with it and was doing pretty well with the unrolling step - I could get hundreds of sheets out mostly hole free.

This is one of the problems with big prizes for community efforts--strong motivator but you're crazy if you think anyone is sharing results with 100s of k on the line.

I mean I gave up... It was a fun evenings entertainment, but it outlasted my attention span.

Got lots of paper-like things, and have learnt a lot about the papyrus plant and the long cells it has... But didn't manage to get out anything that looked like 'ink'.

You can see some very promising ink detection results here: https://scrollprize.org/tutorial4

And in this recent paper: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/educelab/EduceLab-Scrolls/...

Anything you would like to share? Those hundreds of sheets would be useful for the community, and would be eligible for a $2000 open source prize.

Or if you'd like to tell us what you did in private, we'd appreciate that too. team [at] scrollprize [dot] org.

I do worry the problem is insufficient data. What other scanning techniques are there? Does PET and MRI or work on these things?

Is there any way to dope the structure to make the ink more visible? Something akin to immunocytochemistry marking via looking for chemical markers? Given the amount of innovation in immunocytochemistry binding methods, why couldn't they do something here for the ink?

The science of archeology is a destructive one. Temples and tombs escavated in the late 1800’s could have largely benefitted from the rigour and advances made in modern archeology. How much information and narrative are lost to time due to their archeological mistakes?

The same applies here. Experimenting with chemistry at all runs the risk of destroying the information forever. During these tests, the artifact must be preserved. If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?

Yes, definitely you came out ahead in that case, but the problem is you’d likely have to destroy some amount of them without being able to read it before you got the method perfected.

I'll bite.

> If you destroy the artifact but are able to read it, did you really come out ahead?

Yes.

We think there's enough data.

There is a multi-century history of chemical methods destroying scrolls by the hundreds without reading them, so we're not eager to fund that work.

Who is behind this and funding the prize?

Quite a significant amount of money for something like this. Curious why it is deemed so valuable, unless it's more about the side benefits of improving the state of the art.

Edit:

> Vesuvius Challenge Inc. is a 501c3 non-profit organization that was formed solely to solve the puzzle of the Herculaneum Papyri. It is currently funded by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and by many hours of volunteer contributions.

> Nat read 24 Hours in Ancient Rome during the 2020 COVID lockdown. He fell into an internet rabbit hole that ended up with him reaching out to Dr. Seales two years later to see how he could help speed up the reading of the Herculaneum Papyri. They came up with the idea of the Vesuvius Challenge. Daniel was intrigued by this idea and decided to co-sponsor it with Nat.

Edit 2:

Original recruitment ad is neat https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35176585

Nat Friedman

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169869

Can't wait for those scrolls to be readable. There's potentially so many scrolls still buried. With a bit of luck we will get complete versions of lost works from the ancient world.

Sometimes the works we do have from the ancient world seem…. Better? Like meditations is still the only ‘self-help’ book I’ve ever read that has actually made me a better person. I find the stoic philosophy so powerful, and every incarnation of philosophers afterwards are generally… pessimistic or cold and calculating?

I personally hope we find a copy of Death by Starvation by Hegesias of Kyrene. The ancients could do pessimism just as well as modern philosophers :)

Probably a selection bias, most (all?) ancient works we have were copied by hand (expensive!) and widely circulated enough for us to still have them. So we still have Marcus Aurelius but not Caesars poetry.

This is definitely the case. Most ancient texts were not lost in the burning of Alexandria or whatever, but simply decayed. The texts have to be actively copied to be preserved, and there was not the money to do this continuously over 2000 years. So only documents that the rich of times considered most important to be preserved were copied.

On the other hand, we still only have four out of the eight books of Epictetus’ discourses. (He’s another stoic philosopher and his discourses had a similar impact on me as meditations had on you.) This seems to refute the strong version of your argument.

good discussion with Friedman on the project here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcvMjoJdck4

I've been checking in on the Herculaneum scrolls every few months for years to see if any progress has been made reading them yet, so to see such a well orchestrated competition around them is really exciting!

For those looking for dates, this challenge started around March 15 and the deadline for the smaller open source prize is April 15. The final deadline is the end of this year.

#2 looks like something you would clean up with a scroll

How feasible is this?

$700,000 worth of feasible.

How am I gonna be an optimist about this

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