"Unveiling Ancient Secrets: NVIDIA GPUs Decode Roman Scrolls"
A computer science student used an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU to decipher a single word from the heavily charred Herculaneum scrolls, earning him $40,000 in the Vesuvius Challenge organized by GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. The AI model trained on the GPU detected "crackle patterns" to reveal the word πορφυρας (or porphyras), meaning "purple" or purple dye used in clothing. The next challenge is to find passages that are 144 characters long, with a prize of $700,000 for retrieving four distinct passages.