00:00 I was thinking of the Roman Empire, as one does occasionally.
00:03 I found a book called "24 Hours in Ancient Rome,"
00:06 and I started reading it.
00:08 Turned out the book, I kind of realized halfway through,
00:10 it was actually written for eighth graders.
00:12 But it was a great book.
00:14 I highly recommend it.
00:15 And it kind of just threw me down
00:16 this ancient Rome rabbit hole.
00:18 And eventually I stumbled upon the story of this villa
00:22 that had been covered by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD.
00:27 It had been the home to an enormous library
00:30 of papyrus scrolls.
00:32 And that in fact, this was the only library
00:34 of papyrus scrolls that in some way
00:37 had survived since antiquity.
00:39 Knapfriedman is one of many people who are obsessed
00:42 with a collection of carbonized papyrus scrolls,
00:45 discovered inside the ruins
00:46 of a luxurious Herculaneum villa in 1752.
00:50 Since then, there have been many attempts
00:52 to unravel and read the scrolls,
00:54 which unfortunately ended up destroying or damaging them.
00:57 Now, artificial intelligence tools provide a new opportunity
01:00 to decode the content of the scrolls.
01:02 I'm a computer scientist,
01:12 not a manuscript scholar or an historian,
01:15 but I did have this engineering idea
01:17 that we could do digital restoration
01:20 of pages that are not flat.
01:21 We could make them flat.
01:23 And ultimately of things that are wrapped up
01:25 that we could totally unwrap.
01:26 Frank Seals has spent much of his career
01:28 thinking about how to read ancient scrolls.
01:30 In 2002, that's when we had our first version
01:33 of the software that did virtual unwrapping.
01:35 And we had examples we had created in the lab
01:38 that showed the concept from start to finish.
01:40 And I presented that at the Society of American Archivists
01:43 and I actually received from the audience,
01:46 audible gasps when we showed the result.
01:48 And that was when I knew this is powerful.
01:51 In the years that followed,
01:52 Seals was able to read ancient texts
01:54 like the Book of Ecclesiastes
01:56 and the En-Gedi scroll.
01:57 He learned about the Herculaneum scrolls in 2004
02:02 and immediately began trying to virtually unwrap them.
02:04 In early 2023, Seals and his team had a breakthrough
02:09 when one of his PhD students
02:11 confirmed that machine learning
02:12 could detect ink from the scrolls.
02:14 I found an article about this computer science professor
02:20 at the University of Kentucky, Brent Seals,
02:22 who had this wild plan.
02:25 Tech investor, Nat Friedman,
02:26 had become interested in Seals' work in 2020
02:29 when he fell down an ancient Rome rabbit hole
02:31 during COVID lockdown.
02:33 This is one of the coolest projects
02:34 that I've ever heard about
02:35 and I want to follow it and see what happens.
02:38 It reached out to Brent.
02:39 What if we open up this problem to the world
02:42 and we engage all the bright minds
02:45 who I think should be as interested in this as you are
02:47 and as I feel like I am now.
02:49 We raised over a million dollars, a million two,
02:52 and suddenly we had a $1.4 million archeology prize.
02:57 On March 15th, 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge launched.
03:01 The grand prize to be awarded to the first person
03:04 to decode the scrolls is $700,000.
03:08 The organizers have since awarded 36 intermediate prizes
03:11 for milestones along the way.
03:13 And so we put up this first letters prize
03:16 and the idea was to find 10 identifiable letters
03:19 in a four square centimeter region of the scroll.
03:23 And when we put it up,
03:25 we honestly didn't know if it was possible.
03:27 I was doing an internship at SpaceX
03:31 and I was driving to work in South Texas
03:34 and I listened to a Nat Friedman interview.
03:37 Nat just kind of explains
03:39 the whole Herculaneum Scrolls thing.
03:41 He explains the challenge and at the end he says,
03:44 "If you're listening, there's a chance you could win."
03:46 And I was like, "Holy cow.
03:48 I have to give this a go."
03:50 When I started in March,
03:51 I just wanted to get a good handle
03:53 on kind of how the challenge works,
03:56 what the data looks like
03:57 and just develop good intuitions there.
03:59 There was a rare occurrence where I attended a party
04:02 and I was just kind of sitting in the corner
04:04 and I get a text from one of the people
04:07 on the segmentation team, like,
04:08 "Hey, just uploaded this new piece of flattened papyrus.
04:12 Access my computer from my cell phone
04:13 and kind of set it to run on this new piece."
04:16 And then I just put my phone away,
04:18 don't think about it again.
04:20 And as I'm walking out of the parking garage
04:21 to return to my college dorm room,
04:23 I just pull out my phone again.
04:24 Like, you know, I wonder how that, you know,
04:27 wonder how that new segment's doing.
04:29 And I look at my phone
04:30 and there were like three Greek letters there.
04:32 It was amazing.
04:34 I completely freaked out.
04:36 - Luke Ferreter, who is winning the first letters prize
04:41 on behalf of the Vesuvius Challenge.
04:43 - Indeed, thank you.
04:45 - Those letters he managed to uncover
04:47 show a word translated to mean purple.
04:49 - I just want to read the scrolls.
04:51 We all just want to read the scrolls
04:52 as a common catchphrase in the community.
04:55 - Scholars estimate there may be over 30 volumes of text
04:58 in the unopened Herculaneum Scrolls,
05:00 covering a wide range of authors and genres.
05:03 - It's pretty intoxicating to sit down
05:06 and see writing from someone 2,000 years ago
05:11 that we can just read.
05:12 I mean, that is just a fantastic feeling.
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