Tech entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross announced the Vesuvius competition in March of this year, with a $700,000 prize for reading the library of extremely fragile Herculaneum scrolls.
The problem was no small one as these scrolls were mostly covered and also burned due to the volcanic eruption. Vesuvius in 79 AD when he destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and the city of Herculaneum.
Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old college student and former SpaceX summer intern, deciphered an entire word inside an unopened scroll. According to a press release, he was awarded a $40,000 prize as part of the First Letters Prize, which required participants to find at least 10 letters on a scroll in an area of 4 cm2.
“Today we announce a breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge: we have read the first word of the unopened Herculaneum scroll.
This word “πορφυρας” means “purple paint” or “purple cloth”.
It all started in 2019, when Professor Brent Seals of the University of Kentucky’s EduceLab imaged the Herculaneum scrolls in a particle accelerator, creating 3D CT scans with a resolution of up to 4 microns.
Professor Seals’ graduate student Stephen Parsons has been working on detecting ink in CT scans using machine learning models and has had success with individual fragments. This success caught the attention of tech entrepreneurs Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, who decided to launch a competition.
The winner, Luke Farritor, found several dozen ink strokes and a few completed letters that could be labeled and used as training data for the AI to use.
Source: Digital Trends
I am Garth Carter and I work at Gadget Onus. I have specialized in writing for the Hot News section, focusing on topics that are trending and highly relevant to readers. My passion is to present news stories accurately, in an engaging manner that captures the attention of my audience.
