In 79 A.D., Mount Vesuvius violently erupted, burying the ancient Roman cities Herculaneum and Pompeii in ash. More than a thousand years later, archaeologists excavating the city of Herculaneum stumbled upon a cache of carbonized papyrus scrolls, which were too fragile to be opened and read. For centuries, the content stayed a mystery.
However, this may no longer be the case with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Experts in ancient history are collaborating with programmers to decipher the contents of these mysterious documents. In 2023, a computer scientist and two entrepreneurs launched the “Vesuvius Challenge,” offering over $1 million in prize money to competitors who managed to decipher the contents of the scrolls without ever touching them. Competitors built upon a previous breakthrough in ink detection and digital unwrapping.
The winning team improved ink detection through advanced scanning techniques and machine learning, marking another breakthrough in reading the scrolls. The team used trained machine-learning algorithms to decipher more than 2,000 characters, far exceeding the challenge’s original goal of reading four passages of 140 characters each.
The next goal of the Vesuvius Challenge is to expand these techniques to read 90 percent of four scrolls, up from 5 percent of one scroll in 2023. The progress so far presents new hope for deciphering ancient writings that have remained unreadable.