Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll

The fact I have a computer writing flowery alt text descriptions of my photos with unnerving accuracy is something I would not have predicted for another 20 years. But, here we are...

And this isn't only about the monetary value itself, but also the fact that a large cash prize attached to a challenge boosts the prestige of finding a solution. Nobel Prizes come with about a million bucks on top of them, after all.

I'm quite confident that if someone offered $100 million for deciphering the Voynich manuscript or Linear A, we'd have a solution within 3 years.

```

xxxxxxxxxx <- The surface of the scroll

xxxxxxxxxx

...

xxxxxxxxxx <- The bottom of the scroll

```

So, by tiling the image on the surface you get data that is size_x * size_y * n_layers. So, it can be seen as a video stream with size_x * size_y * 1 channel * n_layers where the layers replace the temporal dimension.

Imagine what we'll be able to do to brains, dead or alive, in 100 years.

And in 10,000, maybe we'll be reconstructing the light cone. Maybe that's what we are right now. (Not serious, but it's a fun thought experiment.)

As for segmentation: get some sort of collective solution going, like the Seti@Home did, but for people who are bored as hell, instead of them scrolling Reddit or Twitter all day. Maybe do it like a CAPTCHA so you get it done for free? I'd segment for a few hours a month if I had the ability to do so.

This is a cool project that has taken a community to build to this point, why not try and open and expand the collective of humans working to understand the scrolls? Get millions of people involved and you don't need to rely on technological crutches and development, though that is not the worst way to go either.

If you know anyone that would help chip in for the Phase 2 of the project (scaling up, please let Nat know! (not directly affiliated with the project management team, just pointing to him as a great contact for that.... <3 :')))) ) )

I hope to visit Herculaneum some day.

Instead of relying upon machinery, some zillionaire has their body dry frozen and stashed in a lunar south pole crater, with a foundation funding interstellar propulsion research to move the body to the coldest stable points discovered along the way towards the Boomerang Nebula (1° Kelvin) and research to revive back from burnt-crisp state.

The foundation incites all sorts of advancements along the way like working out practical fusion and ever more exotic energy generation, AGI, gravity manipulation, Drexlerian nanotech, Dyson swarm, star wisps, self-modifying bodies and so on, in its quixotic quest to fulfill its mandate.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-reb...

In the early days they wouldn't have accomplished anything by pushing forward, so it doesn't take all that much restraint.

I'm more impressed by people in, say, the 1990s or early 2000s. They might've had a shot but there was still too much risk, so they restrained themselves until it was a safer bet.

But we have only read 5% of this scroll and there are a ton more already excavated, it will probably take years before we manage to process what we already have.

Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261465 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)

and this tweet which presumably covers the same ground as OP:

The $700k Vesuvius Challenge prize has been won - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261933 - Feb 2024 (2 comments)

"You recovered... uh... everything?"

So many there's a lengthy list on Wikipedia about it. It's fascinating reading ancients casually referencing works that we otherwise know nothing else about. Without the careful, laborious copying (often imperfect) over the centuries most things would've been lost completely. There's also other works such as maps that did not survive, the Tabula Peutingeriana for example is thought to be a derivative work of one commissioned by Augustus of the known world at the time (to Romans) and of which there's a few mentions in some works by historians at the time.

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

The worse case would be that it was 800 copies of the same scroll waiting to be sold off to other libraries.

Everyone interested in this story should read Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/stephen-greenblatt).

It traces the story of a Renaissance humanist who tracked down and translated the Epicurean philosopher/poet Lucretius' De Rerem Natura, which Greenblatt describes as portraying a strikingly modern way of seeing the world.

In particular Lucretius and the Epicureans denied the existence of supernatural causes, were opposed to religious fear, and posited the ideas of atomism and biological evolution. Of course they're better known for their approach to living life, which Greenblatt shows is more sophisticated than sometimes caricatured, and which he portrays as a breath of fresh air compared to the oppressive moralism and hypocrisy of the Church at the time. (Jefferson and many of the American Founders described themselves as Epicureans.)

He goes on to imply that Epicureanism was influential and widespread in the ancient world but suppressed by the early Church, so that we now know little of it.

Anyone, one of the tantalizing parts of the book is where he describes the carbonized and unreadable Herculaneum scrolls, since they were the private library of a wealthy patron of the Epicureans. I think he thinks being able to read the scrolls will really change our understanding of the ancient world.

And remember: if they hadn't been carbonized, they would have crumbled to dust. That's why we only have the texts that managed to get copied. (Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about the survival and 21st century rediscovery of an imaginary Greek play, and ... I'll let you read it yourself - https://www.anthonydoerr.com/books/cloud-cuckoo-land)

(Apologies for any errors above, as basically all I know about this subject is what I read in the book!)

In all seriousness though, I find this such an amazing project to follow regardless of the outcome(s)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...

Most of what we have left from the ancient world is material that people felt worth copying for _centuries_ after they were written. That's a fairly amazing quality filter and gives people a skewed perspective on the overall quality of material written at the time.

A selection of work from a random library has also likely to be filtered for quality to an extent, and for the most part, the "good stuff" is going to be works that we _already_ have copies of or fragments from. Anything we don't already have a copy is is most likely going to be something that there weren't many copies made of, and usually there's a reason for that.

Which isn't to say that anything we find isn't going to be interesting for other reasons -- even bad writing is going to be incredibly useful for historical research.

One would always want to test stuff in software development, especially if it was fraught and can easily be tested.

Mostly there are no tests to be undertaken in history -hence it it's so much hearsay. But here is an opportunity to gain some genuine certainty, in a way that is normally unavailable! The implementors of this method should absolutely test their process!