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Reading Part 4 Text

The Vesuvius Challenge, led by Seales and Silicon Valley investors, aims to decode charred scrolls using AI technology, offering $1 million in prizes to encourage global researchers. Contestants have made significant progress, with two teams successfully revealing letters from the scrolls through machine learning methods. The competition highlights the collaborative effort in scientific research and acknowledges the long history of work that has contributed to this advancement.

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Muxammedsharip Xabibullayev
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12 views

Reading Part 4 Text

The Vesuvius Challenge, led by Seales and Silicon Valley investors, aims to decode charred scrolls using AI technology, offering $1 million in prizes to encourage global researchers. Contestants have made significant progress, with two teams successfully revealing letters from the scrolls through machine learning methods. The competition highlights the collaborative effort in scientific research and acknowledges the long history of work that has contributed to this advancement.

Uploaded by

Muxammedsharip Xabibullayev
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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In March, Seales — along with Silicon Valley investors Nat Friedman

(instigator and sponsor), Daniel Gross (sponsor) and JP Posma (project lead) —
began leading a global competition to read the charred scrolls after he
demonstrated an AI program can successfully extract letters and symbols from X-
ray images of the unrolled papyri.
As part of the Vesuvius Challenge, Seales’ team released its software and
thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments.
The two unopened scrolls, belonging to the Institut de France in Paris, are
among hundreds unearthed in the 1750s when excavations at the buried villa
revealed an extravagant library of Epicurean philosophical text. They are believed
to have belonged to a Roman statesman — possibly Lucius Calpurnius Piso
Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.
Even after being in the ground for 1,700 years, the carbonized papyri did not
decay. Rather, they were entombed in the solid volcanic flow of mud, dirt, water
and gasses, then desiccated by the heat, carbonized and preserved.
The hope was, and still is, that $1 million in prizes would encourage global
researchers and scholars to build upon the AI technology and accelerate the
decoding.
Teams that enter the challenge are competing for a grand prize of $700,000
— awarded to the first to read four passages of text from the inner layers of the
scrolls by the end of 2023. Progress prizes include $50,000 for accurately detecting
ink on the papyri from the 3D X-ray scans.
“What the challenge allowed us to do was to enlist more than a thousand
research teams to work on a problem that would normally have about five people
working on it,” Seales explained. “The competitive science aspect of this project is
just fascinating.”
Now, six months since the competition began, contestants Farritor and
Nader have virtually unwrapped many layers of papyrus from within (including the
one shown) by building upon Seales’ software. Farritor (first place) and Nader
(second place) separately developed machine learning methods to reveal the ink
within X-ray CT scans of the scroll — resulting in the same findings.
“I was walking around at night and randomly checked my most recent code
outputs on my phone,” Farritor said. “I didn't expect any substantial results, so
when half a dozen letters appeared on my screen, I was completely overjoyed.”
Nader is continuing to build upon his models and has already discovered
more lines of text, which is currently being reviewed by papyrologists. “I hope the
revealed text will show just how fascinating and complex ancient civilizations
were,” he said. “In learning more about them, we can also learn more about how
we can make our world better.”
For their findings, Farritor and Nader have been given the “First Letters
Prize,” which awards $40,000 to the first person or team to find more than 10
letters in a continuous region of the scroll and $10,000 to the second. You can learn
more about the award criteria here.
“Our goal was to engage a global audience in an exciting, scientific
competition that would create acceleration and advancement to the point where
we are now,” Posma said. “The competition continues, but today, we have
achieved a major milestone. We’ll learn a lot from this: what techniques work best,
do we need to adjust how we do segmentation, etc.”
The competition’s results are impressive. But it’s also important to take a
look back — to understand how this discovery came to be over the course of two
decades.
“We also acknowledge the many years of work that it has taken and the
technological advances that have been applied to the problem of reading this
material,” Seales said. “With humility, we acknowledge the non-linear — and often
unpredictable — outcomes of research, which is rarely expected, and not ever
guaranteed, to lead directly to success.”

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