The document, charred during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, was able to reveal part of its secrets thanks to the work of an American professor, a computer science student and artificial intelligence.
It was charred by lava flows that destroyed the Roman city of Herculaneum in 79 CE. A 2,000-year-old papyrus could be deciphered, in part, thanks to artificial intelligence. The document having been badly damaged by the fire, it cannot be opened otherwise it would be permanently destroyed.
At the origin of the project, there is Brent Seales, a professor at the University of Kentucky, in the United States, and Luke Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska. The teacher has been trying for 20 years to find a way to read the oldest papyri, too fragile to be unrolled, like the one that was deciphered. To achieve his goals, he developed a scanner capable of distinguishing the areas coated with ink inside the carbonized papyrus. He adds an algorithm that can decipher what is written on the paper.
Along with this professor is Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student. He spent several months improving this artificial intelligence program as part of the Vesuvius challenge, a competition launched by Brent Seales’ team. His work paid off on August 10 when the student learned during an evening with friends that he had just deciphered the word “porphyras” (purple, in Greek).
Years of research for 10 letters
“One Saturday evening, very late, I was at a party, says the 21-year-old student in a video, I received a message from a Vesuvius Challenge colleague who said: ‘We just received this new papyrusvs“Looks interesting, it has the patterns we talked about.” I thought that looked interesting. I sat in the corner with my phone and sent a message: please run the algorithm on this coin. Then I turned off my phone and moved on.” He recounts the following: “I get home, around 1 a.m., I turn my phone back on and I see letters in Greek appear on the screen, not as clearly as that, but I see them.“
“I was completely confused, I almost cried.”
Luke Farritor, student who partially deciphered the papyrusat the University of Kentucky YouTube channel
Thanks to this discovery, the student earned $40,000 via the Vesuvius program and enabled considerable progress. “There is definitely a little emotion, says Professor Brent Seales, in this same video. (…) One of the most eminent papyrologists in the world will read this document which people thought was not possible to read because it was too difficult to extract the text. And today, we are talking about this text.“