UC#2 is the WLBOTT staff papyrologist, and brought to our attention an exciting event taking place right now!
| Staff Papyrologist | |
Jean Maspero
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Joseph von Karabacek
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| Note: despite the resemblance, these are not images of UC#2. Please help us stop the spread of this false information. | |
Congratulations, Luke!!!
Just two days ago (10/12/2023), a young computer scientist, Luke Farritor, claimed the $40,000 First Letters Prize
And the word is: Purple.
At the time of this writing, it is unknown if the word is preceded by “Deep”, or followed by “Haze”.
Led by computer science professor Brent Seales, the team at the University of Kentucky has successfully utilized a technique called “virtual unwrapping” to decipher the text on the scrolls. These ancient artifacts, which belong to the Institut de France in Paris, are believed to have originated from the personal library of a senior Roman statesman.
– ts2.space
How it all unfolded
Farritor and Nader’s discoveries were inspired by Casey Handmer, a polymath who found a “crackle pattern” resembling ink. According to the press release, Casey found ink and a letter by staring at the segmented CT scans of the unreadable scrolls for hours.
Farritor then trained a machine-learning model on Casey’s crackle pattern. He identified multiple ink strokes and more letters and used them as training data. His model started identifying letters and hints of words that weren’t visible to him. After he submitted his findings to the program, a panel of papyrologists noted 13 letters and identified that the hidden word is “Porphyras” which means “purple” and is a bit of a rarity in ancient texts.
– Interesting Engineering
The burned papyri cannot be read because of the black ink used to create the scrolls, but infrared pictures of surface fragments have shown Greek letters and symbols. Seales’s team trained their algorithm to recognize the letters from X-ray images alone using these data and X-ray images of identical fragments. After being taught, the system could detect new text concealed within the tightly bound scrolls.
– Interesting Engineering
From the New York Times
From The Guardian
For the Vesuvius challenge, Seales’s team is releasing its software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments. The hope is that $250,000 (£207,800) in prizes attracts global research groups who can improve the artificial intelligence and accelerate the decoding of the only intact library to survive from antiquity.
– The Guardian
[note: prize money bumped way up since the publication of the Guardian article of 3/15/23]
To get X-rays at the highest possible resolution, the team uses a particle accelerator to scan two full scrolls and several fragments. At 4-8µm resolution, with 16 bits of density data per voxel, they believe machine learning models can pick up subtle surface patterns in the papyrus that indicate the presence of carbon-based ink. – ScrollPrize
Semi-sequitur: Pix of Cigar Ash
Herculaneum – Origin site of the Scrolls
Herculaneum is close to Mt. Vesuvius: Flashback to my high school zit-a-thon.
Actual Google street view of Mt. Vesuvius:
Pompeii: a novel by Robert Harris
A very cool book. The main character is a young civil engineer in charge of the aqueduct system around Pompeii. Not to minimize the tragic events and great suffering, but the engineering surrounding the aqueduct system is truly incredible.
Will there be a Buffet?
Italian Restaurants Named “Pompeii”: 5.2 MegaPastas
Italian Restaurants Named “Vesuvius”: 3.8 MegaPastas
Since this is all gonna get billed back to the WLBOTT shareholders, let’s research “Palatial Italian Restaurants”
