The Vesuvius Challenge

October 12, 2023

The Vesuvius Challenge is a fascinating contest that offers up $1M in prizes for anyone able to read scrolls that were buried in the ashes of a volcano.

Very recently, college student Luke Farritor won the $40,000 First Letters prize with his work using Machine Learning.

Here’s a summary of the challenge/task:

The Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls housed in the library of a private villa near Pompeii, were buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. For almost 2,000 years, this lone surviving library from antiquity was buried underground under 20 meters of volcanic mud. In the 1700s, they were excavated, and while they were in some ways preserved by the eruption, they were so fragile that they would turn to dust if mishandled. How do you read a scroll you can’t open? For hundreds of years, this question went unanswered.

There’s a ton about this project that’s absolutely fascinating. These scrolls exist, but are too fragile to physically handle/unroll. And so the only way to see what the scrolls contain is to find some method of “reading” the scrolls without actually opening and reading them.

As much as I know AI and advances in technology simply go towards more effective marketing campaigns… it’s nice to see actual scientific progress. And the positive ways in which tech can improve our understanding of the world.

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