The manuscripts are more than 2,000 years old and were severely damaged after the eruption of the volcano in AD 79.
Three scientists managed to read a small part of charred manuscripts after the eruption of Vesuvius with the help of artificial intelligence, reported AFP.
The manuscripts are more than 2,000 years old and were severely damaged after the volcano erupted in 79 AD. The Herculaneum papyri contain about 800 scrolls charred during the disaster that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, organizers of the Challenge of Vesuvius competition say – Brent Seals from the University of Kentucky, USA, and Nat Friedman, founder of the Github platform.
The manuscripts are kept in the French Institute in Paris and in the National Library in Naples. Organizers of the reading competition have scanned four scrolls and offered a prize of one million US dollars to whoever can decipher at least 85 percent of four paragraphs of 140 characters.
The trio that won the Vesuvius Challenge and a $700,000 prize was Youssef Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, Luc Farriter, a student and intern at SpaceX, and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student.
They used artificial intelligence to separate the ink in the charred manuscript and identified Greek letters. Thanks to this technique, Luke Farriter has read the first word of a paragraph – pansy.
According to the organizers, Nader, Fariter and Schilliger deciphered about five percent of one scroll. According to Nat Friedman, this is probably a manuscript of the Epicurean Philodemus.
The papyri were discovered in the 19th century in a country house.
According to some historians, they belonged to Lycius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus – father of Calpurnia, one of Julius Caesar’s wives. Some of these texts likely contain the history of key periods of Antiquity, Robert Fowler, an ancient history specialist and president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek.
Photo: University of Kentucky
