I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
Hats off!
I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished
If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.
A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.
I was wondering, how does this all get funded?
so https://www.esrf.fr/home/UsersAndScience/Experiments/BM18.ht...
Wonderful that all of this amazing technology exists
Wonderful that we used it to read these ancient scrolls
Thank you
What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?
Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.
e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247
Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.
Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.
A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access
edit: I found this:
https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/se...
The JSON seems to suggest that I'm mostly looking at ink detection output, but I could easily be using the tool wrong.
But I also found this awesome explanation:
https://scrollprize.org/data_fragments
I guess I bunch of the training was done by using fragments of scrolls where ground truth data is available using IR photography.
Also... that xray resolution is absolutely amazing!
A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].
[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.
> Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.
Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.
One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?
2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
Yes, there are a very great many!
The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.
Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.
So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.
David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.
These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.
To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.
Given this.
> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.
I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a humbling to all the naughty conceited moderns.
If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.
They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.
So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.
To understand the enemy is to some extent to start to love the enemy and that's bad because the enemy is bad. The idea is that you can only have empathy for certain people.
Worth also pointing out that there's also a more modern but uncommon idea that empathy towards someone or a group may weaken and shutter their own "truth" or identity stories but this is for the moment only heard in radical academia not on the street.
Generally there's also a large amount of people who don't know what "empathy" means with the ever present confusion of it with "sympathy", endorsement and alignment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards
Congratulations, and thank-you!
I was under the impression that there was almost nothing left of that school of thought, and that it’s writings had been destroyed.
What would you like to have instead?
The Epicureans and Stoics did not care much about Christians and Jews, but after the Christians obtained the power in the Roman Empire they made great efforts to persecute and discredit the Epicureans and the Stoics, as the most dangerous kinds of non-believers. (Unlike the rational Epicureans and Stoics, the traditional polytheists could be much easier converted to Christianity, by inventing a set of Christian saints to which the former polytheists could redirect the prayers and the holidays to which they were habituated.)
The Christian propaganda has created a false image of the Epicureans, which has persisted until today.
The Epicureans were not atheists, but they had a very different conception about what Gods are. They thought that in nature there are a lot of entities that have a god-like power, i.e. humans are too small and weak to influence them in any way, but the life of the humans is strongly dependent on the actions of those entities, so they can rightly be considered as gods. Examples of such entities are the Sun, the Moon, storms, volcanos etc.
Unlike in the traditional Greek and Roman religions, where it was believed that for each such natural phenomenon there exists some sentient god, who can be convinced to change the events to a more favorable outcome by prayers and sacrifices, the Epicureans believed that the gods, even supposing that they were sentient, in any case they do not care about humans more than humans care about ants, so there is absolutely no point in praying to them or bringing sacrifices to them.
Therefore humans should conduct their life according to ethic principles, but without worrying about what gods may think about their actions.
Many modern humans would probably agree with the Epicurean philosophy, which was completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures.
Interestingly, in Jewish literature (Talmud and further refined by Maimonedes) Epicurus refers to a certain kind of non-believer, not to a sinner for pleasure. See here for example https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.3.8?lang...
I always wondered about that because I guess I fell for the "Christian propaganda" as you call it.
a) one who denies the existence of prophecy and maintains that there is no knowledge communicated from God to the hearts of men;
b) one who disputes the prophecy of Moses, our teacher;
c) one who maintains that the Creator is not aware of the deeds of men.
are actually accurate enough renderings of what an Epicurean might have said in a discussion with a Jew, because as I have mentioned, Epicureans believed that there are gods, but those do not pay attention to humans and do not attempt to communicate with humans, because humans are insignificant for them.
This is quite different from how Epicureans were portrayed in Christian literature, where calumnies against them were preferred for avoiding any direct controversy.
History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.
Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again
Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.
I can see why you'd be attracted to this project from a "let's solve problems computationally" perspective (never mind the historical side). It sounds like there are some cool problems in there.
The eye toward automating the process that the project seems to be targeting is particularly cool, too. This kind of stuff that makes me have real enthusiasm for ML.
We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.
Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.
I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.
For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.
Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?
The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.
The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap
In this case the time on the equipment would need to be included, both a portion of the cost of building/maintaining it, and probably the energy needed to run it. Even where the government is providing the grant (likely here), it still needs to be accounted for.
This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .
For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.
I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.
To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.
https://gizmodo.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-deciphered-c...
It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!
Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.
Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?
where else do you think these techniques be applied?
There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.
I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.
You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.
That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.
Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.
BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.