I may be very skeptical of all the buzz surrounding AI right now, but there are practical uses for the technology. Ancient scrolls dating back to A.D. 79 were burned in a volcanic eruption. Unrolling them is impossible and over the years scanning technology has tried to see anything inside. But using some AI, a college student assisted with deciphering the ancient text. Kyle Melnick at The Washington Post has more.
The text message he received at the party included an image from one of the scrolls. [Luke] Farritor sat down in a corner to review the picture and uploaded it to his AI program before returning to the party. When he was walking back to his dorm room around 1 a.m., Farritor pulled out his phone from his pocket and was shocked at what he saw.
His AI program had detected about a dozen letters from the image.
“I was completely amazed,” Farritor told The Washington Post. “I freaked out a little bit, jumping up and down, yelling, screaming.”
Papyrologists later translated the Greek letters into a complete word — “porphyras,” an ancient Greek word for purple.
The Washington Post
Melnick's work was part of the Vesuvius Challenge created by University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales. The goal is to somehow get inside these otherwise unreadable scrolls. With $40,000 awarded to Farritor, that's quite the motivator to figure all this stuff out.
The Herculaneum Scrolls are one piece of the famous Pompeii event where the eruption of Mount Vesuvius both destroyed and persevered and entire village. Technology has progressed to unlock the preserved artifacts but progress comes in small steps. With AI scanning the scrolls and working through barely-decipherable writing, it may be a fantastic application of the technology.