In 79 AD, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed several ancient Roman towns, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. It also buried the Herculaneum papyri, a collection of ancient scrolls in an Italian villa, in the process. To date, about 800 scrolls have been recovered from site excavations, but classical historians think there may be thousands more. There have been unsuccessful attempts over the centuries, however, to unroll these fragile scrolls.
In this entertaining read for Businessweek, Ashlee Vance and Ellen Huet describe computer science professor Brent Seales’ more recent quest over the past 20 years to decipher them. With the help of a former GitHub executive, more advanced technology, and a machine-learning competition called the Vesuvius Challenge, it’s finally happening.
Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.
The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.
from Longreads https://ift.tt/mLfdZnq
Check out my bookbox memberships! 3, 7, or 15 vintage books a month sent to organization of your choice, or to yourself!
https://ift.tt/owqDtfB
