First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ...
> The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have to be identified. ...
> After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It's easier said than done - both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they're almost indistinguishable from each other.
> So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light.
Presumably, it's possible for errors to slip through, but human labelers can similarly make errors.
That's often an argument for AI systems: Is it better than humans (than avoiding car accidents, reading text, reading x-rays, etc.). But in science we need observable evidence.
The observable evidence here is the raw x-ray data. Based on the article, what is being done here was using ML to process that X-ray data, to create another set of output that the humans could analyze.
I understand jumping on the anti-AI bandwagon, but this ain't ChatGPT. Using ML to process complex instrument output has been used since at least the 70s. This is much closer to statistics based approaches than it is to some random startup trying to sell your manager on some snake oil AI-assisted whatever.
I don't know your background, so I'm sorry if I'm assuming anything. Any chance you articulate what specifically you don't like about the method they used to process the data, other than "It's ML?"
Why be an asshole? What do you accomplish? I now have zero interest in what you have to say. I stopped there.
Lol. That only supports my original assessment. Bye!
And if they did, then it almost certainly wouldn't come out as identifiable Greek letters, since these models are strictly looking at local patches of texture to identify the presence or absence of ink. Again, these aren't just black boxes spitting out long passages of Greek text, everything past the initial ink detection is still done by hand.
[0] https://scrollprize.org/firstletters#caseys-crackle-pattern
In fairness, the paper may answer that question but I don't have time now ...
1. OCR absolutely does "hallucinate", and the word better suits that domain of OCR than the domain of LLMs as OCR will sometimes "see" text that doesn't actually exist.
2. This isn't OCR, it's more like contrast enhancement on a CT scan. Looking at a the project website, there's other work to figure out the shape of the paper surface because that's not obvious or simple either.
The output of this model is what might be given to an OCR, but given how noisy the picture in the article is, I suspect not.
Instead of obsessing over other accuracy technique for fully autonomous detection they should focus on human assisted detection to improve the quality/value of the solution. In this case recall/sensitivity is the utmost important accuracy metric and try to get it closer to 100% if possible. Hence even if the ML/AI got it wrong (due to false positive detection), at least the human experts can have a look at it and hopefully eliminate any false positive. It also considerably reduce the burden of the upstream manual based inspection/automation since it is machine automated. This can also mitigate and hopefully prevent false negative detection because false negative detection will not has the opportunity for further inspection/verification by the human experts or trained inspectors. Essentially the AI/ML is functioning as the filter shifting through the massive data very quickly (with minimum or zero false negative), and then the results are then verified by the much slower human experts.
From the blog post where they announced 2023 grand prize: they did a couple of things to verify the results, including scanning the same area multiple times and making sure that multiple models produce similar results.
https://scrollprize.org/grandprize#how-accurate-are-these-pi...
That is, unless 'truth' means something different in ML, which would be troubling!
News from Scroll 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857417 - Oct 2023 (210 comments)
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861 - Feb 2024 (216 comments)
Shouldn’t people be more mad at dummies doing it?
Taking this to its logical conclusion, it is pointless for us to discuss anything we're not actively doing.
Perhaps you could also investigate the motivation of the people who tell you how to feel and what to think?
Along those lines… how many were receiving say, USAID themselves?
The liberal media echo chamber is preventing people from using common sense. When media and congressional democrats literally call us “Nazis” — it’s hard to take any of it seriously.
“Trump is a fascist”
If that’s true, he’s the first fascist in history to attempt to make the government smaller.
Apparently being interested in free speech and smaller government and reducing waste, fraud, and abuse is fascism.
The people screaming loudest about USAID for example huge hypocrites, or have a very short memory: https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/icymi-washing...
In theory, DOGE isn't a bad idea, but you look at the implementation, and you look at the moves Musk has made to remove his enemies from their positions, and you look at the things they won't touch - their goals align more with making the billionaire class richer than anything relating to free speech or reducing waste. Musk lies constantly, with and without reason. I personally think he's so used to it, he can't help lying at this point.
Regarding USAID specifically, it was set up in the aftermath of the Foreign Assistance Act by John F. Kennedy, and as an agency it was later established as law by Congress. Trump cannot legally shut down USAID without another act of Congress, and he cannot legally redirect its funds, which have already been appropriated. The administration is well within their right to change how the funds are allocated, but so far the stated intention has been to shut off all foreign aid, not change what aid is provided.
The fact that Warren Christopher etc. wanted to get rid of USAID 27 years ago is irrelevant, since that plan was never adopted and did not call for shutting off foreign aid, so it's not comparable. It's just misdirection.
It's also difficult to take arguments for "government waste" seriously in the case of USAID. First, the agency has a tiny budget of around $50B (2023), 16x less than Medicare, or around 0.8% of the entire state budget. Secondly, it was explicitly set up to give away money. Waste is its raison d'etre! Reports show its admin overhead being around 7.7%, which is very low for an aid organization.
It's pretty clear that USAID isn't cut because of waste, but because the Trump administration wants to stop giving aid to poor foreign countries. However, they're not so inclined to say that out loud.
It's also a self-own because USAID is an important soft power tool. It's one of the ways the US can project a positive image on the world, something it has been very good at since the post-war period.
He has cut the staff from 1400 to 300. And it will now be serving US interests.
No need to panic now.
The administration has now shut down CFPB (also illegally, I believe) [2], an agency that has done nothing but good for the average American.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/us/politics/usaid-job-cut...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/finance/regulation/vought-moves-to-defan...
Pretty sure that's exactly what the US voted for in the last election, considering that was pretty explicitly promised. I think most of the US is cheering them on as they do it.
If they refuse to impeach, then they are tacitly handing the Executive ever more power, essentially moving us from a republic to an elected dictatorship.
And given that the GOP has a majority, no matter how slim, it seems very unlikely they will impeach.
And the president can say "I'm gonna ignore that and dismantle the agency Congress set up to do it"
What power does Congress have anymore?
Fact, no one can show that USAID’s more curious and controversial grants served American interests.
You don’t measure a baseball game by number of hits or strike outs, but by the number of runs scored. The popular vote is literally irrelevant.
He is more popular now than any point in his first term.
What's the internal logic that rationalizes executive regulatory power being unconstitutional with a legal presidential power to unilaterally ignore Congress's funding allocations?
They have no understanding of history, of how important such separation of power are.
In such context, it is easy to see the logic. They have no idea the relevance, only that their team likes the outcome.
So much potential and he dropped out of school to become a Thiel/Musk minion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism
What the OP actually says is 'fulfilment can be found through the pleasure of everyday things' which is very much in line with Epicurean thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism#Pleasure
> Epicureans had a very specific understanding of what the greatest pleasure was, and the focus of their ethics was on the avoidance of pain rather than seeking out pleasure.
So whether the description of the work (as GP critiques) is correct, really comes down to whether the definition of 'pleasure' used is as in Epicureanism. Certainly someone unfamiliar would misunderstand it.
Despite that it was once common, very few people today have any more reason to know about it than they have to know about silphium or electrum.
> But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.
"scientists"
They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids.
This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/
There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for Citizen Science.
We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can discover.
I can't understand the editorial bent in this article. I think editors believe scientists to be vaunted and inaccessible creatures that live in the rarefied climbs of "science mountain." Meanwhile it's just some kid down the block who would love to be interviewed by the BBC.