Machine learning means we can read a 2,000-year-old carbonized scroll buried by Mount Vesuvius and turns out it's all about the pleasures of stuffing your face

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(Image credit: Vesuvius Challenge)

Animation of a 3D scan of a Roman scroll.

“The X-ray photos are turned into a 3D volume of voxels using tomographic reconstruction algorithms, resulting in a stack of slice images,” the Vesuvius Challenge webpage says.

Then a step called Ink Detection was carried out on the unfurled layers, and this uses a machine learning model to identify the inked regions of the papyrus.

Various teams of researchers have then been trying to extract text from the scrolls as a part of something called theVesuvius Challenge. Each team used various methods, models, and improvements to the previously developed methods to try and uncover more of what these scrolls are hiding. Each team then had until midnight on January 1, 2024 to submit their results to enter the challenge before a team of “eminent papyrologists” reviewed each entry to verify the results. The winning team won $700,000.

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Here’s a look at the segmentation process in 3D space of the scanned scroll.(Image credit: Vesuvius Challenge)

Animation showing manual and automatic segmentation in Volume Cartographer.

The winning team used the combined knowledge of these approaches to produce the clearest results with the rolled up scroll remains.

(Image credit: Vesuvius Challenge)

A 3D scanned Roman scroll.

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“The submission contains results from three different model architectures, each supporting the findings of the others, with the strongest images often coming from a TimeSformer-based model… In addition to unparalleled ink detection, the winning submission contained the strongest auto-segmentation approach we have seen to date.”

Around 5% of the first scroll has now been read as a result of all the work from all the teams of researchers working on this crumbly subject. And that’s why the 2024 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize has now been announced, with the ambitious aim of going from the 5% now known up to 90% of all four scrolls that have been scanned.

So, there’s definitely work to be done to understand more of it, but even today the researchers have some idea of what it says: “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.”

Yep, it’s all about the pleasures of life, or what’s known as Epicureanism. Namely, for this section at least, the pleasures of stuffing your face.

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