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Part of a fragile Egyptian paper rush roll carburize nearly 2,000 eld ago in Mount Vesuvius ' bam has been virtually unrolled and almost entirely decode with machine encyclopaedism , gain the researchers responsible for a $ 700,000 award .
The text , indite in ancient Greek , investigates pleasure from anEpicureanviewpoint , a school of thought whose apotheosis was pursue delight in a life free from pain or veneration . The practical decipherment was reach by a squad of three — Youssef Nader , Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger — that find more than 2,000 persona , or about 5 % of the scroll . They received the $ 700,000 prize on Monday ( Feb. 5 ) for solving theVesuvius Challenge .
Youssef Nader, the winner of the Vesuvius Challenge, received $700,000 for unveiling text on a nearly 2,000-year-old scroll.
The Vesuvius Challenge was initially herald in March 2023 by its founders , Brent Seales , a professor of computer skill at the University of Kentucky;Nat Friedman , the former CEO of GitHub ; andDaniel Gross , the co - founder of the search railway locomotive Cue . They were enthralled by the Herculaneum papyri , a collection of hundreds of papyri scrolls from the ancient papistic townspeople of Herculaneum that were rapidly buried and carbonized in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius ' blast in A.D. 79 . In 1750 , a farmer fag a well accidently detect the remains of a Doroteo Arango that was probably owned byJulius Caesar ’s beginner - in - law , Bloombergnews cover . The Francisco Villa withstand the corpse of the carburise roll , which crumple in the hand of anyone who tried to unroll them .
But the ink on the papyri , however strain , is still present . So , the challenge ’s founders asked people worldwide to use auto - learning to unveil the text . To get participants start , the founders take over scrolls from the Institut de France and visualize them at the Diamond Light Source speck accelerator in England . They , together with several institutions , then released X - ray tomography scan of several scrolls . They made software available to help oneself participants almost try out the artifacts , and offered more than $ 1 million in cash plunder provided by donors .
" In a way , it feels like building on my ancestors ' innovational sprightliness from 5,000 age ago with their invention of Papyrus sheets , " Nader , an Egyptian machine learning doctoral student at Free University of Berlin , said in a statement . " By convey an ancient gyre back from the ashes , we stay to celebrate and document the incredible story of human ingenuity . "
A physically unrolled scroll.
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Nadar was the runner - up winner in the first part of the challenge , which was grant in October 2023 . In that feat , participantsrevealed just a few words of a whorl , including πορφύραc , which mean " purple dye " or " clothes of purpleness . "
In the late competition , participant had to divulge four passages of 140 characters each , with at least 85 % of the characters deciphered , according to the challenge . The judge check accuracy in a few way . applicant had to provide their code so that evaluator could see if they got similar results ; images among teams were compare , to assure they were capture the same image ; and the ink detection model were not base on Greek letter , which might guide the machine learning models to " hallucinate , " or make up textbook . rather , the models track dots of ink that were subsequently aggregated as letters . These feat revealed the Epicurean committal to writing .
Researchers weigh the scroll that was just partially deciphered.
The ancient author , thought to be the hedonic philosopher Philodemus ( who lived from around 110 to 30 B.C. ) indite about how scarceness or abundance of item can affect pleasure . For instance , do lesser quantities of things convey more pleasure than those that are in teemingness ? The generator disagrees : " As too in the caseful of nutrient , we do not right away think matter that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant . "
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Researchers scan a papyrus at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford, in England.
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" Is the author Epicurus ' follower , the philosopher and poet Philodemus , the instructor of Vergil ? It seems very likely,“Richard Janko , a professor of classics at the University of Michigan , said in a financial statement . " Is he writing about the effect of medicine on the hearer , and comparing it to other pleasures like those of food for thought and drink ? Quite probably … So many question ! But melioration to the recognition of the ink , which can be expected , will soon answer most of them . "
The unfurled nearly 2,000-year-old scroll.
