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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

they likely would, Pompeii and Herculaneum are _still_ being excavated after two centuries, it's not like things are still.

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.

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> it will probably take years

In the direction things are going ... maybe a few months :)

There’s more to processing than scanning, it has has to be reviewed, transcribed and translated by linguistics experts, and then analyzed and studied by academics and researchers who can put in context and integrate it with what we currently know about history, cultural, philosophy, etc of the time.

The biggest bottleneck is getting the experts to read it. You need a decade or so of graduate level education and interpreting things takes apparently quite a long time.

Maybe that's another AI application.

As much as I'd like to endorse study of the classics, I'm almost certain that AI will be better at interpreting the texts than humans very soon.

GPT 4.0 isn’t even remotely close to being useful at all in this case so I have some doubts about ‘very soon’

I doubt it. Most universities have some professor in this area and a few graduate students. There is very little else for them to read (the entire of all classic books we have fits on a shelf), and most of them can read the original language. They will read this as soon as it is available just because it they don't have much else to read that is a primary source material. Thus everything new is of great interest because there is so little to work with.

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri was discovered in the 1800s, has been fully digitized and experts expect it to take I think 150 additional years before they can all be read to the level of scholarship that's required

I found some conversation on the difficulty here https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/16dj68i/h...

Thanks for the link. However the problems there do not seem to apply here. There the problem seems to be lots of little fragments that need to be fit together to figure out the scroll. Here the scrolls are complete in one piece, so we have a much better idea of how the parts fit together (not perfect since this is layers that have to be combined, but close). There just getting the text is hard, here we mostly have the text (though we will need to error correct, they are at least readable)

If you can automate the input, you can probably automate much of the basic analysis (things that would be "revolutionary" to undergrads).

"ChatGPT, give me the highlights of these ancient Greek scrolls ..."

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