What does it actuallymeanfor AI to decode what has eluded humans for centuries?
Vesuvius, whichburied PompeiiandHerculaneumin ash.
The towns were wiped off the map for over 1,500 years.
An intact Greek philosophical text, carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79.Image: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images/Gizmodo
Flash forward to 1750, when workers digging a well discover marble flooring under the soil.
Further excavations reveal a buried villa containing nearly 2,000 carbonized scrolls and charred papyrus fragments.
Today, over 300 unopened scrolls remain, mercifully sparing the early, crude attempts at revealing their contents.
One of the unwrapped Herculaneum papyri. Photo: Unknown / Wikimedia Commons
The Vesuvius Challenges 2024 goal is for 90% of the teams scanned scrolls to be read.
If translated, it will be the first time the scrolls are read since they were buried in ash.
Why do researchersneedAI to read the scrolls?
Top to bottom: a reference photograph, a texture image, a network-generated prediction image, and a network-generated photorealistic rendering of a letter on a scroll. Image: Parker et al., PLOS One 2019
In the classics, AI is speeding up and scaling up processes previously painstakingly done by humans.
In the case of the Herculaneum papyri, those tasks come in a few forms.
Simply put, aconvolutional neural networkis a set of machine learning models that relies on deep learning for tasks.
A Herculaneum papyrus fragment at the National Library of Naples. Photo: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
you might think about the approach as kind of a pointillist approach, Seales said.
(If you didnt know,the T in ChatGPTstands for Transformer.)
As the team wrote in their work, Ithaca is designed to assist and expand the historians workflow.
Ithaca and models like it can unlock the cooperative potential between artificial intelligence and historians, the team wrote.
In a 2024 paper inComputational Linguistics, their teampublisheda sweeping survey of research on ancient texts using machine learning.
However, the researchers also identified hurdles to overcome.
Thats not to diminish the work of the team; if anything, it emphasizes it.
The AI framework is not making a decision about a complete letter form, Seales said.
It is simply highlighting where it perceives ink in the scrolls, which reduces the possibility of hallucination.
The answer is just you oughta you oughta keep the human in the loop.
All told, the cost to scan all the scrolls todaywould be $30 million.
As for your burning questionwhat can we actuallylearnfrom these documents found in the shadow of Vesuvius?
And thats not all.
Excavation is costly, though the team has plenty of scrolls to sift through before that moment comes along.
The scrolls are just one piece of this puzzle, though.
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