They read the scroll thing! AI helps decipher ancient document charred by Vesuvius

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'Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them,' reads a scroll virtually unwrapped with the help of AI

A sealed scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius' eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, has finally given up its secrets, thanks to a combination of machine learning and high-resolution CT scans.

In 2023, researchers managed to decipher a few words from among the char and ash that make up the bulk of the scrolls. Some of those same prize-winning researchers recovered more passages from one of the scrolls, PHerc.Paris.4, netting them the $700,000 grand prize from the Vesuvius Challenge contest in early 2024.

Fast forward two more years, and those grand prize winners are now part of the Vesuvius Challenge team that managed to read the surviving portion of a rolled scroll end-to-end, as the...

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