The "Elder Scrolls", which could not be opened for 2,000 years of sleeping underground, was deciphered by three students with AI
Tencent Technology News According to foreign media reports, a team of three students who had never known each other before the game used AI technology to decipher part of the famous scroll artifacts of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago and won a grand prize of $700,000 in the competition. The students' ability to solve problems with AI is impressive, and the clever arrangement of the challenge initiated by the tech gurus also provides a boost for them to collaborate and use their talents.
Before we get started, let's get a little background. Papyrus is a plant that the Egyptians used to make paper and became an important medium for the dissemination of information in ancient times. The Herculaneum papyri is a famous Elder Scroll that was buried under the mud and ashes of a private residence near Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Around the 18th century, when they were rediscovered, the damage was so bad that people could not read the Elder Scrolls.
In 2023, tech bigwigs raised $1 million to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, which requires participants to use AI technology to decipher several paragraphs of text in the scroll. A major breakthrough was recently made in this challenge, with three students coming out on top.
Before participating in the Vesuvius Challenge, the three students did not know each other. And they still haven't met in person. But they deepened their friendship through collaboration, accomplishing together what they couldn't do alone.
Richard Janko, the chief professor of classical scroll studies at Michigan State University, had dreamed of reading the papyrus scrolls before the three students were born. Yanke said that without the help of scientific and technological talents, deciphering the scroll would be an almost impossible task.
The remains of these scrolls may contain secrets of ancient science, mathematics, and philosophy, but they are too badly damaged to be physically unraveled.
Burnt papyrus scrolls that look like dog droppings
About 20 years ago, Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, devised a new way to unlock the secrets of the scrolls with modern technology. The process consists of three steps: the first step is to scan, the second step is to cut open, and the third step is to find the ink. It sounds simple, but it's actually hard to do. First, the reels must be scanned in high resolution through a particle accelerator. Then, the sheets need to be identified, divided, and numbered. This is the only way to allow the machine learning model to look for ink.
Theoretically, Hales argues, this is not impossible. But he also didn't know how long it would take to translate the theory into reality, until he received an email from a stranger,
The sender was Nat Friedman, a well-known tech investor and entrepreneur who served as the CEO of GitHub. At that time he learned about the Herculaneum Scrolls and was fascinated by them. After hearing about the work Hales had done to decipher the scrolls, he wanted to help. But he didn't know how to help, so he emailed Hales. After discussion, they decided to run a challenge.
Of the three students who won the challenge, Luke Farritor, who majored in computer science and interned at SpaceX last year. He is a brilliant man with a wide range of interests in computers, science, and archaeology, and is perfectly capable of helping decipher scrolls, but the problem is that no one will turn to him for such a favor. The Vesuvius Challenge gave him the opportunity. "This research approach is grossly underestimated," Farrito said. "I think there are a lot of these challenges that need to be played in a lot of different areas. ”
Farrito said that the appeal of the Vesuvius Challenge is that it has a lot of prize money and historical significance, it evokes feelings of heroism, it is in line with the idea of introducing the latest technology in various fields, and it also has the thrill of being part of an adventure story. Farrito later told the media that he was thinking, "If I spend my time scrolling through TikTok, I might as well spend it on this project." ”
Another member of the team, Youssef Nader, is a 27-year-old PhD student in machine learning at the Freie Universität Berlin. Nadel, who is Egyptian, felt the same way as Farrito when he read the news about the Vesuvius Challenge, but for a slightly different reason for deciding to compete.
"As an Egyptian, I was intrigued by the word papyrus," he told the media. Soon, he began to focus more on the challenge than on his PhD. "It's like I'm living a secret double life," he said, and soon all he had on his mind was the Roman Empire.
The third member, Julian Schilliger, is 28 years old and a graduate student at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
From left to right: Julian Hillig, Yusuf Nadel and Luke Farrito
One of the benefits of hosting a challenge is that it attracts talent, especially young talent.
Of the more than 3,000 scientists and technologists who participated in the Vesuvius Challenge, many were students. These young people are often the ones who have the time, the most creativity, ambition and curiosity, and these happen to be necessary to experiment with a new technology.
The challenge, co-sponsored by Sears, Friedman and their investment partner Daniel Gross, crowdfunded the money and offered an enticing prize: $700,000 in prize money for the first team to restore four clear segments of about 140 characters each by the end of 2023.
They knew that the challenge would attract a large group of AI tech talent. What they don't know is how much progress will be made in the decipherment.
When Friedman conceived the challenge, he thought it was important to link competition and cooperation, so he set up "milestone rewards" in the Vesuvius Challenge to encourage participants to share their progress and code.
If it's pure competition, then making small progress will also cost more manpower, because there is so much work to be done and the chances of success are small. Friedman wanted to make the "small chance of success" far bigger. For example, a contestant with a PhD in theoretical astrophysics used new technology to successfully detect cracked or hidden ink traces on a scroll. It was a significant discovery, and the entrant received a "milestone prize" of $10,000.
When Farrito learned that two Greek letters were recognizable, he trained his machine learning model to look for more characters, which requires computer vision to recognize ink that is invisible to the naked eye.
One development inspires another – and that's just how the Vesuvius Challenge is so strong.
Last summer, Farrito returned to his dorm after his internship and conducted research on five computers. His new AI model found that there are about 10-letter words spelled porphyras, which means purple. Farrito became the first person in two thousand years to read words in an unopened scroll. It also earned him a $40,000 bonus.
On the other hand, Nadel also won a "milestone reward" of about $10,000 for his progress. He bought new computers and cloud computing services to carry out his research.
At this time, Farrito and Nadel decided to work as a team and no longer work alone. Shortly before the December 31, 2023 challenge deadline, Hillig joined the team. Hillig is good at extracting pages from reels, which can provide more data.
When the deadline came, they came out on top out of the 18 teams that submitted their results.
So what exactly is written on these papers?
Sorry, it's not completely deciphered, and the winning team has only deciphered a small part. The author of the scroll, most likely the famous Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, discusses topics that we still talk about today: music, food, and pleasure. That is, how to live a happy life.
Everyone involved in the challenge is thinking about what they will do next and how they can apply the lessons learned from this competition to other seemingly impossible tasks.
Now everyone knows a little bit about the reels, but wants to know more. The Vesuvius Challenge proposes a new goal in 2024: to recover 90% of the 4 scrolls that have been scanned. And this may be just the beginning. Scholars believe that there are even greater treasures waiting to be unearthed from Herculaneum, enough to keep them busy for another millennium or two.
Farrito probably doesn't have that much time to spend on the reels anymore: he just dropped out of school because Friedman hired him. He joined the company the day after he won the Vesuvius Challenge. (Compiler/Yunkai)