"AI Deciphers Ancient Herculaneum Scrolls After 2,000 Years"
Originally Published 1 year ago — by NBC News
Archeologists have used artificial intelligence to decipher some of the ancient text from the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of around 1,000 scrolls carbonized during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. A global competition, the Vesuvius Challenge, offered $1 million in prizes to anyone who could find a way to read the remaining closed scrolls, most of which are preserved in a library in Naples. A team of three students won the $700,000 grand prize after training machine-learning algorithms on scans and were able to read 2,000 letters from the scroll, revealing new text from the ancient world that has never been seen before. This breakthrough has been hailed as revolutionary by experts in the field.
