A computer science student has managed to make an ancient scroll readable again. For this he used a 6 year old Nvidia graphics card. You can get this GTX 1070 used today for around 100 euros. The prize money for his work is an impressive 36,500 euros.
By finding treasures that are thousands of years old, we learn a lot about life in the ancient era. There was such a find in Italy in 1750. However, at that time, some of the scrolls discovered were carelessly opened and destroyed forever. Now the ones that were not opened back then are being investigated.
The scrolls were completely charred by a volcanic eruption. Only a few years ago, using today’s technology, an X-ray process was developed to digitize the scrolls. Words, let alone entire texts, could not be deciphered using this method.
The Vesuvius Challenge launched a call to further decipher these digital scrolls. The successful participants include a computer science student. He used an old graphics card and an AI learning model for his work. A company has already bred artificial intelligence by combining real brain cells with computer chips that can play games.
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Nvidia GTX 1070 and AI technology make student 36,500 euros richer
What is it about? The Vesuvius Challenge asked participants to decipher ancient scrolls from the Roman Empire. These 2,000-year-old scrolls were badly charred during an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. If you tried to open the parchment you would completely destroy it. The only way to read the content is to digitize it.
Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student, has now achieved this. He used the computing power of an old Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card. The card was originally released in 2016 and is now sold used for around 100 euros.
How did the student go about it? The student used an X-ray scan of the scroll as a basis. To make the ink on the papyrus recognizable, he used an AI-based learning model. The calculations for this were taken over by the graphics card.
In this way he was able to identify the word “πορφυρας”. This means something like “purple dye” or “violet cloths”. Luke Farritor submitted the result of his work for verification. After successful confirmation by a team of developers and papyrologists, he was rewarded with prize money equivalent to 36,500 euros.
Why does this competition exist? X-ray scans of the scrolls have already been taken. The ink on the scrolls is carbon-based, just like the papyrus used. As a result, the ink offers too little X-ray contrast. The words written with the ink cannot be deciphered.
Led by Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, the Vesuvius Challenge was launched. The competition is financed by private donations. The prize money is staggered differently. The more words are discovered, the greater the reward for the discoverer. You can find details on scrollprize.org.
Are there any other winners? Yes, other participants have also been successful in the meantime. These were able to read individual words using other digital methods. The prize money paid was the equivalent of 9,100 euros, significantly less than Luke Farritor’s sum.
However, no one has yet been able to claim the main prize. To do this, at least four individual passages with continuous and plausible text must be deciphered. Each passage must also be at least 140 characters long.
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