First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student | Hacker News Reader

First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student

scrollprize.org

1,122 pointsrazin207 comments

The lettering was found by looking for 'crackle' texture on papyrus segments from the CT scans which obviously were in the shape of Greek letters, and annotating those as training data. Unfortunately such crackle texture isn't visible, at least by eye, on most of the papyrus. Probably it's only that visible where the ink was very thick. You can easily see the difference in texture in this electron microscope image [1] (far higher resolution than the CT scans) but especially on the very edge of the inked area (the narrow strip in the left image; I think the whole right image is inked) where the ink was pushed to. I'm surprised the crackle was discovered only after the Kaggle Ink Detection contest. Looking at the CT-scanned fragments with infrared ground truths, which were used in the Kaggle contest, Casey Handmer wrote [2]:

> The ongoing apparent failure of deep-learning based ink detection based on the fragments indicated to me that direct inspection of the actual data would be more fruitful, as it has been here.

> ...

> I found similar “cracked mud” and “flake” textures corresponding to known character ink, but only for perhaps 10% of the known characters. It’s been a long day, I can probably find more on closer inspection, but that does make one wonder about automated ink detection and what that is seeing.

These new images are much better than I hoped for, but still only in one small area, so I'm still pessimistic about more than an odd sentence being readable.

[1] https://scrollprize.org/img/tutorials/sem.png

[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien...

I actually participated in the challenge for a little while and this was the approach I took before I dropped out to do a few other things.

However, what I did was a bit different -- instead of looking for a crackle, I surmised that that 'crackling' effect actually is just of course slices of the data over different rifts in the parchment, and that the data of the ink lay on the manifold of that crackling and bending.

It would not be as clear to the human eye for all of the letters, I think, as there are many, many, many layers in the scanned image, and you can only start to see a pattern emerge over time as you cycle through the images.

I was working on code that minimized an optimization function that was basically the total variance loss if I recall correctly, where it just interpolated each pixel column up and down bilinearly to 'align' the blocks of the image so that the crackle texture was flattened.

From there I planned on using a rather optimized convolutional network on the 'flattened' image, which can I think be done rather efficiently as if you look at a cross section of the scroll you can see where it's like a tree in that the pinching and such seems to be somewhat locally consistent, so you might be able to get away with some interpolation.

I should probably share the code if this is of interest to anyone, since I'm not pursuing the competition at the moment.

Also, this is why I did not buy into 3D convolutions for this, at least. Ink that has been laid and dried should follow a semi-predictable pattern that a 2D convolution can detect, I do not know if a 3D convolution really brings us anything, as the invariances we desire can be structured up front more easily.

If there is interest in the code, let me know and I can do a little digging, otherwise, it is a fun challenge, for sure.

I, for one, would be interested in the code.

I ended up cleaning it up to share it and got sucked back into the project. >:'(((( Spent 2 hours today in RawTherapee trying to improve scan contrasts :'((((

I hope to post a perhaps more cleaned up version of at least the dataset code, the aligmnent code is extremely messy and in the discord server (licensed under 'free to steal as many ideas as you want from' basically).

whisper post the dirty code whisper

Unless you've, like, named all the variables with ethnic slurs, you're not going to get in trouble because you've just copied and pasted the same subroutine twelve times instead of refactoring it into something clean.

Other things like hlb-gpt? :)

I'd studied the problem to work on it, but didn't get as far as you. I agree that intuitively (not backed up by experiment) I expect that preprocessing to further flatten the segments and other hand-crafted features based on desired invariances should work well. It seems that a lot of people really have just used 2D convolutions, applied to just one or a few surface layers and then combined. So I'd also be interested in your code.

> I surmised that that 'crackling' effect actually is just of course slices of the data over different rifts in the parchment, and that the data of the ink lay on the manifold of that crackling and bending.

I'm afraid I can't follow this.

See also Nat’s twitter announcement: https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1712470683207532906

$700k is a life changing amount of money. I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start…

It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

Or a customer complaint: https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/complaint-tablet-to-ea...

What I love about the Ea-Nasir story is the tablet was found in a pile of other tablets, suggesting that Ea-Nasir saved them. Why? Who knows, maybe he found them funny.

I heard somewhere it was common practice to reuse tablets. It was easier to scrape the surface clean than to make a new tablet.

You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean.

In Mesopotamia there was a period where it was fashionable to use a more rare softer red clay on top of the white clay. Your stylus would cut through the top layer leaving nice white letters on a red background. It made it easier to scrape clean and reuse, but much less durable over time.

Yes, the clay tablets were used over and over. The ones that are preserved have what was written on them when they were fired, accidentally, by being in a building that was destroyed by fire.

Yeah, and a large number of clay tablets found were training tablets. At any given time, there may have been more students working on properly learning the mechanics of writing on tablets then tablets in circulation so a surprising number of what is found is, basically homework, or apprentice practice.

That's fascinating to this lay clay tablet thinker. It had never occurred to me that clay tablets were reused. In fact, it nearly fundamentally changes my estimation of them as a long-term durable storage medium.

Hardening clay is relatively simple (just as any other pottery) but optional - you can choose to keep the clay unbaked if you want to reuse it (it would dry out but can be made wet again), but you can also make them permanent.

> You'd save any tablets you have, and might wait until you need it to scrape it clean.

The 3.5” floppies of yore.

The first meme dump.

Well done.

> What do you take me for that you treat me with such contempt? …

Apparently "What do you take me for" is an extremely old phrase. Funny how things stick around. I wonder if that's a result of translation though.

If you like the Ea-Nasir story, there is a whole subreddit dedicated to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ReallyShittyCopper/

Also: https://xkcd.com/2758/

A laundry list with something purple...

purple was the color of nobility and rather rare. It might be the description of a king or a room or roman fashion items.

Or a complaint about bad writers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

it might cost more than $700k in compute.

It certainly did. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312385

Where do they say that the winners used that cluster?

It is an assumption based on the fact that the codebase uses cuda and the main backer of the project owns the cluster.

> It is an assumption

Then don't say "certainly"

Why not? If they had bought the compute themselves, it might cost more than $700k.

I am absolutely certain that the compute might have cost more than 100 trillion dollars.

Many amateurs compete in Kaggle, most of them use whatever hardware they have to hand, and a lot of them will use CUDA directly or indirectly.

That's the capital cost of the cluster, not of the compute cost of this operation. Significant and cool, but it over-represents the amount of compute required.

Unfortunately some people are taking you seriously. The whole scrolls are a huge amount of data, but for this First Letters prize using more than one GPU would be overkill. The amount of training data available is actually too small for deep learning to even work well.

This is one of more than 600 scrolls that could be read afterwards if the method becomes scalable. What's more: "excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground." [0]

[0]: https://scrollprize.org

Being able to virtually unroll the scrolls within reasonable time/effort/cost will hopefully encourage the Italian government to approve further excavations of the villa for more papyri. If Vesuvius erupts again we don't know how much of the present excavation will survive.

> if the method becomes scalable

the machine learning stuff is cool, but it's important not to discount the apparently pretty manual labour still involved in the virtual unwrapping:

> Early in the summer, a small team of annotators (the “segmentation team”) joined our effort. They began mapping the 3D structure of the scroll using tools initially built by EduceLab and improved by our community. By July we had segmented and “virtually flattened” hundreds of cm2 of papyrus.

So, it sounds like it was about a month or two of work, for a single scroll. Although, it probably could be partially or fully automated too, with some effort. Already they developed some tools to help, and I guess it's the kind of task that gets easier after you do it the first time.

Actually it's much worse than that. Only a very small fraction of the first of the two scanned scrolls has been segmented/unwrapped after 5 months, and it's the easiest parts that are done -- about 1000cm^2 across something like 100 layers of papyrus 10cm wide. Only 50cm^2 of scroll 2 is done. Where the sheets are right against each other is much harder.

But at the same time: scanning tech & software automation just keep getting better, including via spillovers from other unrelated projects.

The ability of an ML system to learn to mimic what the manual "virtual unrolling" process is doing, from a small number of examples-to-follow, is growing.

Each bit of success, once confirmed by other experts or correlation with other texts, improves the training data.

Eventually a fully-software pushbutton pipeline of "raw imaging to likely texts" should be possible.

And if, say, some of the scrolls are sufficiently 'read' nondestructively to embolden teams to risk destructive techniques – such as incremental ablation while reading the exact chemicals at every coordinate – even higher-resolution data could become available.

But that's expected!

When you are discovering to do a new thing that nobody knows how to do, you first try a bunch of things manually to learn what works and what doesn't.

Only after you have a procedure that reliably works, you automate it.

> It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

Most likely not, I believe they're starting with scrolls that were readable on the outside, which we know are minor works of Greek stoic philosophy. Also a laundry list would be written on a reusable wax tablet, rather than costly papyrus.

It's likely somehow a reference to the Emperor. Purple cloth was extremely rare and expensive, and it was the colour worn by the Emperors. Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it. I don't know if that was yet true at the time of Vesuvius, although Wikipedia claims Caligula may have had someone killed for wearing purple.

The other word visible is "oino", wine. Wine can be described as purple.

While modern people make that connection, that is culturally dependent. The color terms available to speakers of a language, and what objects those terms can be associated with, change over time. In the case of the Greek word for "purple", it was connected to a dye and therefore used for clothing, but one shouldn't expect it to be used for wine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea_(Homer)

"Wine-dark sea is a traditional English translation of oînops póntos (οἶνοψ πόντος, IPA: /ôi̯.nops pón.tos/), from oînos (οἶνος, "wine") + óps (ὄψ, "eye; face"), a Homeric epithet. A literal translation is "wine-face sea" (wine-faced, wine-eyed). It is attested five times in the Iliad and twelve times in the Odyssey[1] often to describe rough, stormy seas. The only other use of oînops in the works of Homer is for oxen, for which is it used once in the Iliad and once in the Odyssey, where it describes a reddish colour. The phrase has become a common example when talking about the use of colour in ancient Greek texts."

Says you.

Says anyone familiar with Ancient Greek, and also anyone who has followed linguistics (even in pop-sci form like Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass) recently. The comment by fsckboy, which was already there when you commented, gets it. For the Greeks, the connotation of wine was different than purple, purple was not a basic color term in that stage of the language, and πορφυρός was used only in the context of purple clothing and the dye used to make it.

wine stains are decidedly more purple than the wine they came from too.

Only if you assume that whoever scribed the scroll wasn't too concerned about what order the letters in a word should be written in.

The image is annotated OIWN and the article tentatively identifies the word as OMOIWN, meaning "similar".

I see “oiōn” (οιων), not “oino” (οινο or οινω). I don’t see how it could be read as “wine”. οιων could be several things off the top of my head:

1. the beginning of some form of of οἰωνός “omen”

2. genitive plural of οἶς, meaning “of sheep”

3. a genitive plural of some other word with a stem ending in -οι-, but with the beginning of the word missing. For example, the demonstrative τοίων “of such”, relative οἵων “of which”, or ποίων “of a certain kind”. Or, as speculated in the article, ὁμοίων “same”.

The 3rd option seems most likely to me without any further context. ὁμοίων seems especially plausible since the preceding characters do resemble "ΟΜ".

> Indeed, it eventually became a capital crime for people outside the Emperor's family to wear it.

Similarly, various Emperors far away in China had a similar enforced color-monopoly, except it was on yellow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_in_Chinese_culture#Yello...

Under traditional Irish law, there was no significance to any particular color, but the number of different colors you could wear simultaneously was determined by your status.

The general phenomenon of legal protections on status signifiers goes under the name "sumptuary laws". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

Interesting. Does that mean the Yellow Turbans choose Yellow to demonstrate a lack of legitimacy for the Eastern Han emperor?

AFAICT the imperial color requirement came about a few hundred years later.

Tyrian purple was so incredibly expensive that you would have had to do something illegal to get it unless you were already an incredibly wealthy noble with the right political connection.

Still interesting that they found that word. As far as I know the sea snail it comes from didn't inhabit the waters off Herculaneum.

> $700k is a life changing amount of money

Probably ~half of that will go to taxes?

Not sure why this is downvoted. Yes, in California half will go to taxes and the rest is enough for a downpayment on a shack. Hardly life changing.

Pretty damn life changing, actually, for the vast majority of even gasp Californians.

Must be nice to be a billionaire.

I'm a fairly well paid engineer and I would certainly consider a $700k gift to be life-changing.

I make good, but not FAANG, money, and $350k after-tax, all at once, would still put me most of a decade ahead, financially, and give me some much better options for dealing with a bunch of stuff. Yeah, life changing.

> would still put me most of a decade ahead, financially

I think that might be the kind of the crux of it. Saving this money to get a decade "ahead" might help your retirement life (assuming things don't collapse before then), but not your current life. Whether that's considered "life-changing" might be in the eye of the beholder.

No one can not consider that life changing in that context?

> No one can not consider that life changing in that context?

Money only changes your life when you do something with it. If you just just let it sit (for retirement or whatever) and continue living as before, then your life hasn't changed (yet).

If you dispute this, then consider the most extreme case: what happens if you (say) die before you have a chance to use that money during retirement? Did that money change your life then? In that case your entire life was (by definition!) the same as before; only your retirement account ended with a higher balance than it would've otherwise. The only thing that changed was your expectation for the future, not your reality.

And you can imagine other situations where the money ends up not changing your life in any significant way... like the money getting stolen before you use it, creditors taking it during bankruptcy, hyperinflation rendering it effectively worthless, etc.

Point being, as long as the money hasn't actually changed anything in your life, it... hasn't been life-changing. (I guess in some sense this is a tautology.)

> Money only changes your life when you do something with it.

Not at all true. Unspent money is potential energy. It dramatically alters the holder's perception of risks, and thus influences major life decisions.

The point here isn't "it can't change someone's life", of course it can. The point is there are lots of people for whom it wouldn't do so, and for those people it legitimately isn't life-changing. e.g., a lot of people would lock that money away for retirement and avoid factoring it into major life decisions at the present. Of course, there are also people who would spend a billion dollars immediately (and even those who would then go broke again). YMMV.

It's not a gift, it's a prize, which you are only likely to get if you spend a fulltime effort on it (thus losing out on other income sources). There also is a deadline until end of the year (not sure what happens after that).

So it's more of a (skillful) gambling prize than a gift.

>Hardly life changing. Maybe your life is pretty good already then.

Not sure why this is downvoted :p I'd guess HN income is multimodal with a peak for broke-ass college students and 3rd world programmers (where it is life changing) and another peak for the gainfully employed (where it isn't).

> It’s also funny that the scroll might just be a laundry list.

Even if it were, a laundry list from 2000 years ago would be a fascinating read.

I don’t think people in those days wrote bullshit. You had to know how to write, and if you did, no one was entreating you to write grocery lists.

They absolutely did, we have plenty of proof of ancient romans and other cultures writing down jokes, little squabbles, "John was here" on walls etc, one of the oldest known pieces of writing is literally one merchant complaining to another merchant about some marble that wasn't as ordered.

on walls and tablets, but on papyrus? Papyrus was expensive.

>I admit, it’s tempting to drop everything and go devote myself like a monk to the pursuit of ancient enlightenment via modern ML. I wonder where we’d start…

I think you'd be shocked how well LLMs translate cuneiform in the CDLI notation. What's hilarious is my first attempt included examples in-context and Claude prefaced the translation by stating that there's nothing in my example translations about "bulls", "horns" or "grabbing" and that it will ignore that translation. I looked it up word-by-word and realized Claude was right. Blew me away. Yet Assyriology subreddits were as excited about my findings as lawyer subreddits are about LLMs. Not sure why, either. Just a bunch of, "So what? Does that mean it's useful?".

I highly recommend getting into classical literature. It is incredible and beyond conception — I had a light scattering in my education, but only later and recently have I discovered how incredible it can be.

Suggested Reading for beginners:

* Life of Pythagoras, by Iamblichus

* The Golden Ass, by Apuleius of Numenia (specifically, translation by Robert Graves)

* Life of Alexander by Plutarch

* Education of Cyrus by Xenophon

* Parmenides by Plato

Also, I have found SHWEP.net to be invaluable for a gentle yet rigorous guide through many classics, though it takes an esoteric bent (which I love)

And now the size of the corpus may be about to explode! From the article:

> If these words are indeed what we think they are, this papyrus scroll likely contains an entirely new text, unseen by the modern world.

Life of Pythagoras was super influential to my life. I was very inspired by the way Pythagoras lived his life - a 100% commitment to finding out what is true, travelling all over the world amassing knowledge/practices/skills through humility, trying so many things out and finally spending so much of his life teaching. Pythagoras was probably the greatest philosopher ever. I also recommend reading about Archytas, one of his spiritual descendants, his thoughts on math, mechanics, music, learning and philosophy are amazing.

But he got scared of sqrt(2).

I guess you could say he was being irrational about it. Da dum.

Archytas is famous for having designed a steam powered glider. And for having freed Plato from his brief slavery. But he also appears to have written the first treatise on mechanical engineering:

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

Can someone tell me if there is a German version of Life of Pythagoras available? I cannot find anything for some reason (only one bok on amazon that has only one review claiming it is an automated translation).

A commented translation is available under the title Pythagoras. Legende - Lehre - Lebensgestaltung as a book and as open access here: https://rep.adw-goe.de/handle/11858/00-001S-0000-002D-B3AD-5...

Thank you!

> It is incredible and beyond conception

Could you elaborate a little bit about what you think gives it these qualities? I've dabbled in some classical literature before but I've always found them to be very difficult reads, so I rarely have the motivation to finish them. I am wondering if there is something I am missing about the genre.

Homer and Ovid are pretty good for starter. Metamorphoses is really nice book with lot of stories woven together.

My favorite quote:

> Yet world was not complete. > It lacked a creature that had hints of heaven > And hopes to rule the earth. So man was made. > Whether He who made all things aimed at the best, > Creating man from his own living fluid, > Or if earth, lately fallen through heaven's aether, > Took an immortal image from the skies, > Held it in clay which son of Iapetus > Mixed with the spray of brightly running waters — > It had a godlike figure and was man. > While other beasts, heads bent, stared at wild earth, > The new creation gazed into blue sky; > Then careless things took shape, change followed change > And with it unknown species of mankind.

Sometimes it seems like everything from the Greek and Roman era is known and has been processed by historians and, furthermore, doesn’t have really anything to provide us in the present day.

My experiences with ancient texts makes me realize that there are so many remaining mysteries (that can be illuminated!), so much material that has never been “processed” by historians or philosophers, and so much that can be useful for the present day.

I’m working on an English translation for Marsilio Ficino’s 1497 publication of “De Mysteriis” — which includes 13 tracts, including Ficino’s own “Philosophy of Pleasure.”

Marsilio Ficino was hugely influential in the 1460s-1500 Florentine Renaissance because he was hired by the Medici’s to translate the old Greek classics (Plato, Plotinus, Hermetica, etc). He helped classical ideas spark the renaissance! So the fact that his own book has never been translated is mindblowing — I get to see where I can contribute.

But then in his actual book, I learn that it was fairly common to conceive of the soul, gods, demons etc as entities in the world of Nous or mind. Yet, he specifically says that the soul does not feel and that gods do not feel. That’s weird! Often times people associate soul with “the feeling part.” But there were multiple perspectives on this!

How does this relate to the present? We typically associate intellect and mind with consciousness— yet now AI developments force us to consider mind or intelligence without conscious experience. So, it gives a genuinely interesting framework for understanding “noetic reality” — the unconscious mathematical world of forms and information that seemingly preexists the material cosmos (ie perfect triangles or spheres can be conceived as a part of math that are eternal and timeless).

So that’s just one example but there are a lot of them I could share. Particularly as they relate to history of science and ideas — but also fascinating social phenomena — like how hard the Roman’s came down on the Bacchae — or how important the Oracle of Delphi was to Greek colonization — etc etc.

We are usually not aware of the degree in which Classical and Medieval thought provided the foundations of our modern world. For example, the concept that the universe can be studied by human reason and described with mathematics started as a philosophical/religious idea.

If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend that you check out “The Light Ages” by Seb Falk.

Part of why a lot of readers have found this literature to be inexhaustible is, I think, its surprising combination of familiarity (since it's had so much influence on subsequent Western culture) and foreignness. For example, consider the career of the term "hero," which seems to have meant something like a warrior-aristocrat in Homer, and later, in Greek tragedy, takes on the moral grandeur that we meet with in characters like Oedipus, but somehow also is used to describe the boxer Kleomedes, who massacred dozens of kids because he was upset over losing a match.

When I first started reading classical literature I was struck by an idea I found in Bruno Snell's The Discovery of the Mind, that Homer, apart from having no words corresponding to our "mind" or "soul," didn't even refer to the body as a single whole--more as a collection of limbs. The article here talks about this: https://intertheory.org/torrente.htm .

None of this makes ancient literature easier to read, though, unfortunately.

I'd add that I had a great time reading the Metamorphoses by Ovid.

I wouldn't recommend the Parmenides as one's first step into Plato, it's one of his hardest dialogues. I'd suggest the Alcibiades as the best Plato intro. It's lighthearted to the point of pleasure reading, yet at the same time deep and profound. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1676

Thank you for sharing an easier start to Plato. And yes, Parmenides is typically treated as one of the hardest dialogues. Nevertheless, the core of the dialogue is quite simple, where Parmenides discusses the relationship between the One and the Many. It’s really quite simple, yet it is fascinating and a great example of Platonic dialectic — it ends in mystery, but along the way makes you think really deeply.

Here’s a short segment from the dialogue:

“Then the one cannot have parts, and cannot be a whole?

Why not?

Because every part is part of a whole; is it not?

Yes.

And what is a whole? would not that of which no part is wanting be a whole?

Certainly.

Then, in either case, the one would be made up of parts; both as being a whole, and also as having parts?

To be sure.

And in either case, the one would be many, and not one?

True.

But, surely, it ought to be one and not many?

It ought.

Then, if the one is to remain one, it will not be a whole, and will not have parts?

No.

But if it has no parts, it will have neither beginning, middle, nor end; for these would of course be parts of it…”

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/parmenides.html

I read those names correctly and wondered why, when I realized I'd listened the memory of them was from listening to the first episodes of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps[0] over a decade ago.

[0]: https://www.historyofphilosophy.net/

I recently saw a wonderful youtube video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_L1oN8y7Bs

Title: Herculaneum scrolls: A 20-year journey to read the unreadable

it goes a little bit into the technology of how this was done, deep learning finally cracked the code. They had the scans for a decade but it took ML training to be able to identify which parts were paper and which parts were the ink on top. This had been done on a different set of scrolls with easier to read higher contrasting materials like the video says, 20 years ago. Deep learning is cracking the code for these datasets we had previously thought were impossible to algorithmically solve.

Thank you for sharing. It's a month old, but even so, I just saw a pinned comment ppsted an hour ago about an announcement coming later today.

Can't speak for the video, but this is a bit misleading actually. What cracked this was actually visual inspection looking for patterns which could then be used as better training data, which so far apparently hasn't found very many letters that were too hard to see. Read the OP describing the iterative process of hand-annotation guided by output of a model, then retraining the model with the additional data, it's a fascinating technique! Simply using deep learning on the initially available ground truths without knowing what features the models should be looking for actually pretty much didn't work!

Also, so far the process of virtually unrolling the scrolls is mostly manual and extremely labour intensive.

Thank you for adding the deeper insight! The competition and the methods used are very fascinating indeed.

This is highly misleading. Deep learning was not what did the discovery, the find was handmade. They're trying to make a deep learning model do what was done by hand here, but so far they haven't had success in it finding actual letters.

These models certainly have found letters, although mostly they produce unreadable partial letters. Look at the images from the "What’s next?" section of the article! [1] They certainly seem better than human annotation, and more importantly don't hallucinate whole letters. Casey Handmer made a submission for this First Letters prize [2] based solely on hand-annotation and wasn't awarded it, because it's really unconvincing. His letters [3] don't look at all like the computer annotations.

[1] https://scrollprize.org/img/firstletters/youssef-new.png

[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/08/05/reading-ancien...

[3] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/C-vKV4SdsyH961w6KPwD6rypt0...

This is the 21st-century equivalent of living through the opening of Tut's tomb. Incredible to think there's a very real chance that in the medium-term future you might be able to buy a copy of a newly-translated work on Amazon that hasn't been read for millennia.

Why the ad for Amazon?

It's just a reference to making a boring, pervasive part of culture. Please feel free to buy those translations at any book company you feel like.

Sorry, I'm just cranky this morning.

I hope it's also true that you're cranky just this morning

Surely they will be public domain by now??

It is disgraceful that the ancient Greek authors won't see an obol that these so called "translators" and "historians" make from reselling their work.

They should sue! /s

...copyright = their heirs deserve the money.

This could revolutionize the state of the Greek budget!

https://satwcomic.com/bully-fail

You jest, but countries and cultures have claimed rights on cultural heritage before for people long dead:

https://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2023/04/06/the-puzzled...

The original Greek text is, but I got a C in Greek so I’ll have to pay for a copyrighted English translation.

Pretty sure any translation would be a new copyright.

Pot/ kettle much?

Why not?

That's extremely cool. I wonder what we'll learn.

As an aside, the "Professor Seales and team scanning at the particle accelerator" photo looks like it came from a TV show. "If we keep telling the computer 'enhance', we'll be able to read it".

This might count as one of the most extreme stories of data recovery I've seen. I wonder if in another 2000 years we'll have a "first file discovered on discarded hard drive platter".

"Spot robot dumpster dives in landfill and finds 100,000 bitcoins in discarded hard drive"

"We're working hard to figure out what this 'bitcoin' is, exciting times!"

Given the relative volumes of data prevalent today, it's more likely that random files on a hard drive, or fragments thereof, will be from porn or some other video.

Reminds me faintly of this story https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Fnd_in_a_Lbry#:~:text=MS%20....

Quick aside: I know Chrome has supported the link-to-highlight for years now, but does anyone know where the "#:~:text=" hash format is documented at? Searching for that is really hard.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments

Thanks! This was my main curiosity: "[fragments] are stripped from the URL during loading so that author scripts cannot directly interact with them"

Here is a reference I found: https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096

It appears that it currently chrome only.

The first 30 minutes of this interview does a great job of explaining what's going on here. Really interesting stuff.

https://youtu.be/qcvMjoJdck4?si=RL1WnAAj4loS1D2s

> In early August, contestant Casey Handmer, an ex-JPL startup founder and polymath

interesting terminology, I've never been given accolades for being a multifaceted human being.

I've gotten "generalist" and "after much consideration, we have decided not to proceed with your candidacy "

Hilarious.

From what I've seen, genuine polymaths shirk away from being identified as one, and if they do decide to get recognition, they're shooed away for the unforgivable sin of Not Being Famous Enough.

https://scrollprize.org/ explains the original challenge/issue: other research showed "virtual unwrapping" based on CT scans was possible, but these scrolls had ink not clearly visible on CT/X-ray, so they had to go back to less visible structure (I'm not sure if it's the structure of the paper that changes or actually the ink being visible but less).

I wonder how many AI massage iterations this is away from being able to completely copy arbitrary books without opening them, and if this technology will hasten the demise of paper texts.

If you can just stack 20 random books and within seconds have them be indexed and searchable digital ones, libraries as we know them will suffer perhaps the final blow in obsolescence.

I wrote this for a different community (filled with semiliterate sophists), but this is absolutely huge and could upend huge swathes of understanding about the last two thousand years.

You can avoid the longform essay below if you want. The short of it is there are several potentially common works possibly in the library that could directly prove or disprove what is found in the New Testament and the predicates of Rabbinic Judaism as established at the Council of Jamnia.

We could be seeing the beginning of conclusive proof that invalidates the narratives of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam by the end of the year.

The Vesuvius Challenge isn't just an interesting contest in the machine learning realm; it's a groundbreaking endeavor that could redefine our understanding of the humanities if successful. The opportunity to digitally unroll and read the Herculaneum Papyri could offer unprecedented insights into ancient civilizations and the total feedstock of civilization today. This is not merely about filling in some historical gaps; it’s about fundamentally altering how we understand antiquity and, by extension, our own intellectual heritage.

The loss of the Library of Alexandria has long been considered a "dark age" event for intellectual progress. Now, consider the Herculaneum library—a collection of papyri from a villa once owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law, carbonized but preserved by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD. Hundreds of these scrolls are unreadable because their carbon-based ink blends in with the carbonized papyrus, and thus are invisible to conventional imaging techniques. Yet, these scrolls are quite possibly on the cusp of revelation.

Recent developments have introduced machine learning and high-resolution X-ray scans as methods for reading these "unreadable" scrolls. What texts do they contain? Treatises on science and philosophy? The lost books of Livy? The epic cycle? Governmental policies like the Twelve Tables? It’s a tantalizing question because whatever is locked in those scrolls could be an unfiltered look at the Roman Empire—an empire that fundamentally influenced the trajectory of Western culture, religion, governance, and philosophy.

Ponder a history of Rome that has not been retouched by myriadic emperors, by Constantine's Christianity, or the interpretive lens of the Roman Catholic Church. Unmediated accounts of Roman society, unaltered by the layers of religious and political power that came later, could rewrite our textbooks and shift the justification of history. It’s not just about enriching our understanding of ancient civilizations; this could be a cornerstone on which to build a fresh philosophical understanding of human society.

If the project succeeds, there will be repercussions in the academic realm. The humanities have long struggled to justify their existence in a world that increasingly prizes STEM and lacks any novel sources for the classical world. Suddenly, there could be a concrete, urgent task at hand: to decode, interpret, and integrate an influx of new knowledge. The Vesuvius Challenge could revitalize the field, offering an unforeseen but compelling reason for its study. In essence, it provides a utilitarian justification for the humanities, one that transcends 'cultural enrichment' and enters the realm of 'historical redefinition.'

The Vesuvius Challenge could be the hinge upon which history swings, yielding intellectual treasure that could be as groundbreaking as the writings that were lost in Alexandria. For millennia, those scrolls have remained unread. Now, it's a software problem. That's not just a challenge; it’s an imperative.

The presence of specific works in the Herculaneum Papyri could dramatically impact our understanding of major historical events.

In particular for me, I pray that the biography of Herod the Great by Nicholas of Damascus is discovered intact. While mainstream accounts generally portray the life of Herod within the context of Roman patronage and Judaean politics, uncovering a contemporary account by a close intimate (and used as a primary source by Josephus) would offer fresh, unmediated insights into his rule and its socio-political intricacies. Chronologies of the life of Jesus could be explicitly validated or disproved.

The relevance here is far from academic. Consider the following naturalistic hypothesis: that the inception and rise of Christianity was entirely a dynastic struggle within the Hasmonean-Herodian line. What if the tale of Jesus is, in essence, a dramatized, mystified rendition of a 1st-century dynastic conflict, one that was subsequently co-opted and transformed into a religious narrative by an early form of conspiratorial thinking? Something like a 1st-century version of Q-anon, distorting real events to serve an alternative, concealed agenda in the aftermath of the First Jewish-Roman War.

Unveiling a document like Nicholas of Damascus' biography could be groundbreaking in testing such a hypothesis. If Herod's life and rule were detailed without the religious overlays that later Christian interpretations bring into the picture, one could make more definitive assertions about the socio-political environment of the time. Furthermore, it could provide concrete evidence to either substantiate or refute theories about Christianity's emergence as a byproduct of a Herodian-Hasmonean power struggle.

The fact that such a theory could be tested is significant in its own right. Traditionally, discussions about early Christianity rely heavily on religious texts and subsequent historical accounts, many of which are fraught with dogma and ideological interpretations. A primary source devoid of such influences would be a game-changer, offering a baseline of raw data from which more accurate and reliable hypotheses could be drawn.

And it's not limited solely to Christianity. Rabbinic Judaism could have equally monumental implications as a result. The owner of the villa, likely a wealthy Roman, would be unlikely to have had any primary Hebrew texts like the Pentateuch. However, that doesn't rule out the possibility of possessing Greek or Latin works discussing Jewish culture, beliefs, and politics. Given the villa's historical context, it's conceivable that there might be indirect ethnographic accounts from the period surrounding the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD but before the Council of Jamnia, traditionally dated around 90 AD, which helped canonize Hebrew scriptures.

Why is this important? The Council of Jamnia is often cited as a crucial moment for the development of Rabbinic Judaism. It allegedly led to the fixing of the Hebrew Bible canon and crystallized what would become Talmudic tradition. If documents were to surface that provide a snapshot of Judaic thought and practice just before this council, it could upend millennia of precedent and identity.

In a broader context, discovering pre-Jamnia ethnographic sources could significantly change our understanding of how Judaism adapted and evolved in the aftermath of the Second Temple's destruction. This could lead to far-reaching questions. How much of the Talmudic tradition was actually a post-hoc rationalization or systematization of beliefs and practices that were far more fluid before the Council of Jamnia? How much anti-Romanism was pared away to prevent suppression? Moreover, how would such a revelation interact with or even challenge the validity of current Rabbinic and Orthodox Jewish practices?

The implications for the Judeo-Christian heritage as a whole are staggering. If both Christianity and Judaism could be traced back explicitly to politically or socially motivated machinations, rather than divinely inspired or time-honored traditions, the entire foundation of Judeo-Christian culture would come into question. In essence, the Vesuvius Challenge has the potential to destabilize two of the world’s major religious traditions at their historical roots. It is difficult to overstate the potential impacts.

The Vesuvius Challenge is not just an academic or technological endeavor. Its success could instigate an unparalleled epistemological crisis in religious studies and the humanities. It provides the opportunity to re-examine, with primary sources, the historical foundations of Western religious, cultural, and ultimately political traditions. We're not just potentially rewriting history here; we're reevaluating the very frameworks through which that history has been understood.

So this is just the very begining? Will they be able to decypher whole docs? I guess you wouldn't have written all that otherwise!

Anyway, if there's religion involved, I doubt any revelation will shake anything.

That's true of zealots, but growing the religion anywhere where literate people are will become exceptionally difficult if the myth of Jesus the Christ turns out to be, say, a cipher of the re-execution of Alexandros I, the son of Herod the Great and Mariamne I, with contemporary first-party proofs untouched by time. Sure, there'll be dinosaurs-are-just-a-test-of-faith types, but the explanation of Christianity as a naturalistic emergence with the "mysteries" of the religion given banal and explicit answers would likely make the revolutions in Biblical criticism in the 19th century (e.g. linguistic analysis revealing multiple authors with narrow dates) look like child's play in comparison.

At any time in the last sixteen hundred years, if such evidence were uncovered, it would've been burned immediately and the monastic reading it likely consigned to perpetual silence, lest the word get out.

But the hegemony of Christianity in the West is over.

How does this theory reconcile the existence and growth of Scientology or Mormonism? Or hell, the recent rise of QAnon?

As far as QAnon goes, this would be like discovering an unsecured laptop that actually belonged to the original Q and had something like IRC channel logs that they used when generating "what won't they believe" type ideas.

As for Scientology and Mormonism, they don't have explicitly historical and rational claims to truth like the Catholic Church and some sects of Judaism do. Ask a fervent Catholic or Orthodox Jew why they believe what they do and they'll say "Because it's true." As far as I know (I don't spend significant time with Mormons or Scientologists), they don't make this type of claim to be historically validated by peak reason.

> As far as I know [Mormons] don't make this type of claim to be historically validated by peak reason.

Mormons absolutely believe that their religion is backed up by history: the book of Mormon is about and ostensibly by various descendants of Old Testament figures who migrated to the Americas, culminating in the burial of golden tablets with "Reformed Egyptian" writing in upstate New York. It's obviously fiction - but that doesn't seem to make much difference.

I know both fervent Catholics who do not feel the historical accuracy of the Bible is what makes their belief in God accurate, and Mormons who believe in the literal historical accuracy of their religion.

What makes you think "myth of Jesus the Christ turns out to be, say, a cipher of the re-execution of Alexandros I, the son of Herod the Great and Mariamne I" is at all likely? I read a theory once that Jesus Christ was a reinterpretation of Julius Caesar that was adopted by Romans after the former imperial cult fell out of favor. That seems farfetched, but more likely than this - at least it provides a better explanation of why Romans cared about Christianity.

I'd love to have texts that spoke more about the origins of Christianity and Judaism, but it's far more likely that this trove will contain nothing of the sort - you could imagine a Roman aristocrat in Italy caring about this, but it doesn't seem especially likely.

>What makes you think "myth of Jesus the Christ turns out to be, say, a cipher of the re-execution of Alexandros I, the son of Herod the Great and Mariamne I" is at all likely?

It's not just Nicholas of Damascus that would reveal such information. Gaius Asinius Pollio, a multifaceted Roman figure known for his connections with literary giants like Virgil and Horace as well as Augustus himself, mentored Alexander, the son of Herod the Great. The Roman world in the first century was wide.

Anyway, as to why I think it's possible, I think it's the most simple explanation as to how it emerged. According to what we have (i.e. Josephus) Alexander had the support of the public but was disliked by Herod's loyalists due to his opposing qualities and lineage from the Hasmonean dynasty.

Herod the Great, notorious for his brutal tactics, killed off male members of the Hasmonean dynasty and married the last Hasmonean princess to solidify his rule. He exhibited suspicion towards his wife Mariamne who was also killed eventually, along with their son Alexander.

I posit that Alexander was not actually executed, being a popular favorite and the son of the tyrant who might regret his decision and punish accordingly. Instead, he laid low until Herod's death, aiming to rightfully claim the throne, but was instead executed to maintain Roman rule over Judea with the consent of the Sanhedrin.

After the First Roman-Jewish War, continued supporters of Alexander coded secret histories into what became the apocryphal and synoptic gospels. Episodes like the massacre of the innocents coming from the Hasmonean male purge, "Jesus" being found in His Father's temple coming from Alexander visiting the building site of the Second Temple erected by his father, Herod. There are plenty of other episodes that seem to neatly correspond to and dispel underlying "mysteries" in the synoptic gospels for anyone actually looking for them.

The survival of works by Asinius Pollio or Nicholas of Damascus in particular in the Herculaneum library could confirm or refute this theory. Their writings, likely popular in aristocratic households due to Nicholas and Gaius Asinius Pollio's favor with the Julians, would very much be pertinent to a Roman aristocrat in 79AD.

But I don't need to prove it via circumstantial and inferential evidence--that's why I'm excited. We could actually uncover period documentation by the actual participants rather than the heresay of the following generations living under the shadow of Roman retribution.

I'm not sure why you think an explanation involving a vast empire-spanning conspiracy supported with widespread propaganda and centuries of silence and suppression even from its enemies is more likely than the usual naturalistic explanation "Jesus was a real figure who did the non-supernatural things ascribed to him."

People love these conspiracy theories about religions but they're definitely not the simple or logical explanations.

What are you even on about?

I'm talking about widespread suppression of Jews, whether Christianized or not, that is documented before and in the aftermath of the first Jewish-Roman war, which occurred 68-74AD.

There's no empire-spanning conspiracy lasting centuries, but a continual massage of what came before to justify the current status quo, an extremely similar dynamic as what is recognized by biblical scholars when treating the Old Testament.

Christianized Jews and Jews generally were spread throughout and beyond the empire. The persecutions, even postwar, were terrible but relatively localized and there is no reason to believe it involved the mass redaction of all existing documents (not even possible!) and then-unwritten oral histories (which then everyone, antisemites, Christians, pagans, all alike decided to maintain silence about even though they would have been delighted to show their enemies up with this evidence) except that it makes people feel clever to think so.

Even more incredibly, plenty of heretical documents did survive! People were one hundred percent successful absolutely crushing any leaks of a vast conspiracy to “justify the status quo” (why do you even think it needed justifying?) even against powerful groups that would not have wanted to…but couldn’t stop eg the Gnostics.

Most scholars don’t think that about the Old Testament either, although I have been learning lately it is very much in vogue on certain corners of the Internet. But at least that is in some respects at certain times more plausible depending on the specific text and time period being talked about, if very early. The Christianity conspiracy theories really aren’t. There’s no evidence for them whatever and yours in particular boggles belief, and is really not remotely feasible. This is basically the zeitgeist nonsense with a different spin.

I still have no idea what you're ranting on about, but it's clearly not related to anything I've said. Cheers.

They're talking about what is required for your theory to work. You have no idea about it because you've never thought it out.

Your theory requires a massive conspiracy because otherwise the surviving documents we have that criticise early Christianity blow your theory out of the water.

Can you suggest a good book on this topic?

Demographics refutes your last point.

“by Constantine's Christianity“ is also an interesting reference, although he was just a politician realizing half of the population had adopted a revolutionizing family structure.

>Demographics refutes your last point.

By all means, please explain.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/07/why-peopl....

>These projections, which take into account demographic factors such as fertility, age composition and life expectancy, forecast that people with no religion will make up about 13% of the world’s population in 2060, down from roughly 16% as of 2015.

That's certainly a trend, but it's in relative terms, not absolute terms. The study also did not break the demographics down by religion, nor does it represent hegemony. They don't control the government or the educational institutions. Even further, the notion that religiosity in the West will be Christian is unproven.

Regardless, the kind of active suppression of contradictory evidence to religious narratives that was historically present from the early middle ages to the early modern period is no longer extant. The Church can put any discovered texts on a Novus Index Librorum Prohibitorum all they want, but that's not going to stop academia or the Internet from mining it.

Also, I can speak from personal experience with a traditionalist Catholic father, none of his many kids are Catholic. Having kids doesn't mean successfully keeping them religious.

The interesting thing about moving forward is we are entering the post truth era where technology can spoof and create an unlimited set of falsehoods.

Active information suppression in this era is mostly the work of governments and government aligned corporations.

Random question about the last point, did your upbringing involve nightly family prayer and thanksgiving? Or was the post war impact too great to maintain that tradition?

Comments like this are why I read HN.

I mean, I admire your optimism that historical texts will somehow shake the foundations of religious institutions. However, speaking as someone who lives in Utah, among folks who base their entire belief system on the ramblings of a 19th century scam artist and, I kid you not, magic plates left by the Ancient Egyptians in Illinois.. I think evidence counter to Judeo-Christian belief systems will change precisely nothing.

On the bright side, it will be really fascinating to those of us who like history. We might learn a thing or two from these ancient texts, so there's certainly a silver lining.

Illinois? What belief system is that?

Anyway, Christian followers already expect science to bring faith into question.

I'm one such follower who believes science and faith can describe the same truth, as long as the science and faith are both accurate. Both are systems of experimentation, trial and error. There is much we can learn from historical records!

Nauvoo, IL

Yes, that is where a temple was burned by arsonists and where the leader lived when he was murdered. But I don't think any church is claiming that "magic plates" where left there by Egyptians.

(I grew up near there and have visited the town many times.)

The location was actually in New York. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates

And the history of why the temple got burned was basically ‘because he was stealing all the women’. According to the angry mob that burned it. If I remember correctly.

Mormons believe that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates) that he found near his home in upstate New York, which might be what OP's referring to.

I figured; it's just an important detail that "someone who lives in Utah" would know if they took the slightest bit of time getting to know or understand the religion that surrounds them. It follows that claims of "scam artist" and "magic plates" and "ancient Egyptians" may be dubious, as the person making the claim doesn't actually know the most basic story of the faith.

Do you have any counter cites? Because it seems pretty close!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates

Primary sources.

The only references to Egypt are in relation to the language, not actual Egyptians: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/search?query=egyptians&typ...

i.e. the plates were written in a language reformed from original Egyptian -- which makes sense, as ancient Hebrews would sometimes write in Egyptian characters when enscribing was difficult (metal plates!) because the Egyptian script was more concise. It became reformed after a thousand years on the other side of the world, far removed from original Egyptian land and culture. No Egyptians were ever involved with burying the plates. That would have been a native American, technically a Jew, whose ancestors came over from Jerusalem / ancient Israel.

As for magic plates, there's nothing in the historical record claiming that the plates themselves were magic: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/search?query=magic&types=d...

I guess anyone could say anything they want about them, but those who actually saw and handled the plates never claimed they were "magic" as far as I can tell.

Then as for scam artist -- I suppose that is a matter of personal judgment, since no fair trial ever occurred or made a guilty verdict before he was murdered.

QED

> Then as for scam artist -- I suppose that is a matter of personal judgment, since no fair trial ever occurred or made a guilty verdict before he was murdered.

It's mildly impressive that in the same sentence where you mention there was no guilty verdict "for scam artist", you say Joseph Smith was "murdered", a thing for which there was also no guilty verdict: the five men indicted for the killings were acquitted.

I have to say, this inspired me to track down an account of what transpired - and it is wild! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Joseph_Smith]

Treason against Illinois? Polygamy? Declaring Martial Law? Being kicked out of Missouri after a war named after your religion? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1838_Mormon_War]

All while running for President of the United States, and just before being lynched by an angry mob?

And with no convictions for those accused?

Truly an overachiever.

P.S. One of the best quotes I've ever seen - Missouri Gov. Boggs had an attempted assassination, and during the trial of the most likely suspect - Smith associate Porter Rockwell - Rockwell successfully defended himself with, among other things, (per wikipedia) his reputation as a deadly gunman and his statement that he "never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot!... He's still alive, ain't he?".

Amazing.

> you say Joseph Smith was "murdered", a thing for which there was also no guilty verdict: the five men indicted for the killings were acquitted.

Those 5 men were acquitted, but he still died from being shot multiple times by a mob. How could that not be murder?

If you can read this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates] and not get the same conclusion for 'Scam Artist', then I'm truly impressed.

> as ancient Hebrews would sometimes write in Egyptian characters when enscribing was difficult (metal plates!) because the Egyptian script was more concise.

That’s almost complete nonsense. You give me a chisel and I’ll carve Hebrew in Aramaic square script or paleo-Hebrew much faster than hieroglyphs. A angular hieratic might be a draw, but that’d also be needlessly complicated. The small part that’s not nonsense: some early Semitic texts are written in a simplified form of hieroglyphs that would later evolve into the alphabets we use today, including the usual scripts used to write Hebrew. But those writings weren’t any more concise by using simplified hieroglyphs verses another script.

This Mormon Sunday-school myth is born out of a misunderstanding of how Egyptian hieroglyphs work that impeded their decipherment from late antiquity until the early 1800’s. Namely, that hieroglyphs were some deep allegorical language where a single symbol could be emblematic of entire sentences or more. Joseph Smith apparently believed this, as evidenced by his attempts to translate Egyptian funerary texts as “The Book of Abraham.” We have interlinear manuscripts showing him translating entire sentences and paragraphs from single symbols.

This misunderstanding is further reflected in 1 Nephi 1:2, “I make a record in the language of my father, which consists of the learning of the Jews and the language of the Egyptians.” There are ways to read that line that don’t implicate the widespread misunderstanding of how hieroglyphs work, but the misunderstanding is the one that was generally held at the time the Book of Mormon was published and continuing to today.

I don't think academics are as deferent to scripture as you think, so I don't anticipate an epistemological crisis. Exciting development nonetheless

> I wrote this for a different community (filled with semiliterate sophists), but this is absolutely huge and could upend huge swathes of understanding about the last two thousand years.

Surely writing an essay isn't a good way to convince them if they're illiterate? Maybe they can use TTS.

I wonder how the Sophistry will play out over teletype.

As a short addenda and much more within reach of the project is that we have many hapax legomena (that is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a context) in classical Western languages that are likely to have meanings discerned on the basis of these new texts (not to say anything of new hapax legomena).

For example, the Iliad and Odyssey alone contain around 500 hapaxes. Even if the ground is not shaken, there will at least be some tremors in the field, regardless of whether whole works will.be able to be successfully recovered.

So HN also has its crackpots.

A first edition of the Gospel of John countering the modern version would be great but not sure that a Roman pagan library would bother storing such a thing, then you're left with someone's historical/pagan take on the first century AD. Some histories of Palestine or Christians causing trouble in Rome seem possible, or notes on a Herod's time in power that don't match the Christian narrative. but none of this seems too threatening, large swathes of Christian thought now treats the birth narrative as ahistorical. It might be another blow for the bible literalists, but they're a small group overall and those battles have been going on since the 2nd century. Another Josephus or Tacitus would be great. The big opportunity here is to dismiss the Jesus myth-ers by finding more evidence that a person called Jesus existed. The impact of this on questions around the divinity of Jesus seem rather moot, Tacitus and Josephus talk history from non-Christian perspectives, not theology.

Sophists have an unfairly bad reputation, if you'd just take the time to listen to them uncritically then I think you'll find much of what they have to say very convincing.

A note on the type and number of the texts, from the site:

"Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by an Italian monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable.

What's more, excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that thousands more scrolls remain underground.

Imagine the secrets of Roman and Greek philosophy, science, literature, mathematics, poetry, and politics, which are locked away in these lumps of ash, waiting to be read!"

From my perspective it may be just fitting to the answer. We try to find symbols, without confidence, that the paper still contains information, and any text for trainig. With "rights" network you can achieve any possibile result. It is remember me a russian freak-scientist, which try to read words and texts on the detailed sun surface photos.

This was my first thought. How sure are we that their model isn't just over-fitting and finding letters that aren't really there?

I think they need to make similar scroll, write any text and make the similar damages to check is the approach worked at all

I wondered about that. My understanding is that the models were trained to look for letter shapes, not words. And that the models couldn't produce known words unless they were trained on the language. If it wasn't trained on a substantial text body, a model producing letter sequences that form known words means it found something and didn't hallucinate.

This, along with the way the Antikythera mechanism [1] fragments were decoded [2], always brings to mind the ending of "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence", where aliens far into the future managed to recreate part of human civilization from remaining artifacts and a barely working robot child.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wp3wL8g2Eg

The design of those "aliens" always had me thinking they were super-advanced robots uncovering the beginning of their civilization.

Quite possibly. Also, the flash-forward in that movie was after 2,000 years, which would make the connection with the Antikythera mechanism and the Herculaneum scroll even more relevant. We are the "aliens".

How can they be sure that the results are actual words from the scroll and not just hallucinations of the neural network? If the scrolls are in such bad condition that the data is almost only noise then what stops their high-tech deep learning model from just.. making it all up?

As long as the model doesn't know about words, and finds letter sequences that correspond to words, we can conclude that it found actual writing.

It is amazing what some college student can pull off with today's technology.

thanks!

OT: never before have i seen a 2 days old story coming back to the front page

> Note that texts from this time didn’t use spaces, making it harder to determine word boundaries.

Paging Germans

it's not about _combining_ words into one

better page Japanese

I often wonder how different personal computing and programming would be if we kept using Scriptio Continua or the particularly awkward Boustrophedon where every other line is written in the reverse direction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

Imsurethatwedbeabletoreadtextswrittenwithoutspacesorpunctuationitwouldjustbeabitmoredifficultforbeginnerstoparsethetextbutafteryouvegottenenoughvocabularyitdbeprettystraightforwardtoreadthoughspellcheckerswouldprobablyhaveahardertimetheoneinmybrowseriscompletelydfreakingoutoverthistextanotherthingitwouldprobablyhaveaneffedtoniswordchoicesinceyoudhavetomakesurethewordsyouchosetoputtogethercouldntbemisconstruedorambiguous.

The idea of reading text backwards and

bɘɿoɿɿim ɿɘɈɈɘl ʜɔɒɘ ʜɈiw ,ƨbɿɒwɿoʇ

is absolutely nuts though. I'm definitely

.ɈɒʜɈ Ɉqobɒ Ɉ'nbib ɘw bɒlϱ

Intentionally choosing words which could be misconstrued when written without spaces could make for some hilarious jokes.

For the exact opposite of this, I love what Sanskrit/Hindi does. Each complete word has a bar over it.

Not bad seeing as he solved this while working as an intern at SpaceX too!

i love this project. i feel like this is going to be a great source of interest and value over the next few years (and potentially immesurable value over longer time frames).

Somewhat off-topic but if you clicked in here, you might be interested in this book: "The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code".

On a side note iirc there were also some Dead Sea scrolls that were hard to open, were they able to open and read all of the scrolls?

The word is Ancient Greek for “purple”..it takes a lot of reading to find out!

Based on this, I wonder if the main challenge has already been solved.

Are they controlling for this? How is the validation being done?

imagine the person making this scroll 2,000 years ago wondering 'I wonder if some kid 2000 years in the future is going to win a boat load of money by reading this'

I love uses of machine learning like this a thousand times more than generative LLMs spouting probable-sounding nonsense.

>Shortly after that, another contestant, Youssef Nader, independently discovered the same word in the same area, with even clearer results — winning the second place prize of $10,000.

That's what u get for optimising your code

I thought the same. He had the better results, but too late.

Or maybe the winner optimized his code, resulting in faster time to get results. Either one is equally plausible!

computed on his laptop whilst he was at a party apparently. Legend!

luke here, thanks!

If quality is a factor, they should have withheld the prize for a reasonable time (a day?) in case someone posts a better result.

Not really:

>Youssef used a model from the Kaggle competition and was inspired by Luke’s results to look in the same area.

"He found a few dozen ink strokes - and some complete letters - that could be labeled and used as training data.

Before long, the model was unveiling traces of crackle invisible to his own eye. Soon, these traces began to form letters and hints of actual words."

This does not sound like a "Large Language Model (LLM)" or other large set of training data, like the sort hyped by so-called "tech" companies; this sounds relatively small. What am I missing. (Besides brain cells.)

Indeed, it’s a machine learning model, but not a large one. Who called it large?

He made $40,000 without needing a large data set. No proprietary, corporate LLM needed.

calculated on his laptop whilst at a party

> Casey was the first person in 2,000 years to find ink — and a letter — inside an unopened scroll.

Amusing that this implies the Vesuviuans had the ability to read unopened scrolls.

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