That&#x27;s a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we&#x27;ve scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection.For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.

Given the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?

I am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and&#x2F;or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.

Are the fragments destroyed in ‘69 and ‘80 available to be read similarly? Or were they disposed of?

I am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I&#x27;m a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.

Probably a lot more texts of Epicurean philosophy and not a whole lot else unfortunately according to my papyrologist friend.

Here&#x27;s a list. The scrolls are from a library that burned in 79 AD.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_lost_literary_works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_lost_literary_works</a>

Aristotle&#x27;s second book of Poetics, of course.

What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?

Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.

Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?

I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.

How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I&#x27;m anyways curious what path lead there

What contradictions do you think the scrolls contain?

I don&#x27;t have any questions, just a comment.You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.

No questions, but I just want to say this is really exciting work!

Yes, it&#x27;s quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.

Not all machine learning is generative AI.

Outstanding work! I&#x27;ve participated in the challenge, but didn&#x27;t get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I&#x27;m going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?

Absolutely incredible work. This is one of the most amazing news articles I’ve encountered in decades. Congratulations team!

I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it&#x27;s a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don&#x27;t have a lot of good ground truth, it doesn&#x27;t matter if your code is perfect, you&#x27;ll never get results.

I&#x27;m interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?

30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.The team did &quot;the campfire scroll&quot; experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it&#x27;s not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap

how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what&#x27;s the main limitation on scan amount?have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?

We&#x27;ve been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it&#x27;s mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.

How fast is the process?Could it be automated to the point where it&#x27;s faster to scan a book closed than opened?

Massive kudos to the whole team. I&#x27;ve been waiting 30 years for this announcement, ever since I first heard about the scrolls. Fantastic work!

BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.

What is your origin story? How did you end up doing this and how can I do the same?

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don&#x27;t have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access

Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it?Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.

In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact.I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished

How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It&#x27;s such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that.Hats off!

That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It&#x27;s not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.

Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?

Beats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist.Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. &gt; 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I&#x27;ve learned anything from that, it&#x27;s that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else&#x27;s. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?

That have been dug up? I think 600 or so still exist. Perhaps about 2000 or so have ever been excavated. We have scanned about 30 of them. Still underground? I&#x27;ve seen various counts. Maybe more than 10000?

I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you&#x27;re asking as well&gt; Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. &gt; 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I&#x27;ve learned anything from that, it&#x27;s that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else&#x27;s. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as &quot;chronosonder&quot;. I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it&#x27;s possible. I like to lift weights and I&#x27;m training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There&#x27;s nothing more to it than that, and that&#x27;s ok with me.One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was &quot;We just wanna read the scrolls&quot; but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?

I am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent.The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I&#x27;d like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it&#x27;s important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.

The core challenge team is focused on the technology side to provide the images of ink to our team of papyrologists and they do the transcription, translation, reading, and scholarship.This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@cispemgigante&#x2F;streams" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@cispemgigante&#x2F;streams</a> .

The science to get the text is cool, but where is the best place to read discussion of the text in the scroll, it&#x27;s context, meaning etc?

Mind-bending achievement from you all - thank you!

Can you tell me how many scrolls there were to begin with, how many have been confirmed to have been lost, and how many could he salvageable if they are in broken &#x2F; dessicated form? And how many there are left? Thank you so much. :)

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

Of course! But the title is misleading and gives people the impression that we don&#x27;t already know the library is just full of Epicurean texts.

Sure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.

Ok, I&#x27;ve restored the entire title above. Sorry about that!(Btw, you can use the &#x27;edit&#x27; link to fix things like this if the software gets a title change wrong.)

From my cursory reading of the pre-print, it didn&#x27;t seem like the entire scroll has been read? Or rather, you read everything that can be read, but part of the original have been lost? (Like columns 1-4).VERY COOL WORK!

I think it&#x27;s a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, &quot;An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time&quot;, which is IIRC true.

*Some scrolls.They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to &quot;break&quot; open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.

Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.

My pick would easily be the missing books of ab urbe condita by Livy, so much early Roman history that would be wonderfully filled out for us

I&#x27;m hoping for a complete(ish) Heraclitus. Also Eratosthenes, whose methods have been described but we don&#x27;t have the original work where we calculated the circumference of the Earth. Also Hipparchus and Thales.

I&#x27;m really hoping that the library contains some lost older Greek works. But its going to be awesome what ever we find.

Fortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don&#x27;t need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.

The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...

I found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for.Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content.
Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. &quot;From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence.&quot; Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iris.unive.it&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;10278&#x2F;3687069&#x2F;1&#x2F;Albertin_et-al_Archiving2017.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;iris.unive.it&#x2F;bitstream&#x2F;10278&#x2F;3687069&#x2F;1&#x2F;Albertin_et-...</a>So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.

I always wondered about this, how was there not already tech for a liquor store owner to scan all the lottery tickets without scratching them? On the rare occasions I want to buy a lottery ticket, that&#x27;s one more reason to only do one where I pick the numbers.

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum.A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

What&#x27;s the most interesting le text from olden times that you would recommend?

For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research)I&#x27;m kind of obsessed with the ancient world. I dream of being able to read entire pages of new text from ~2,000 years ago.

You might want to read this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kashgar.com.au&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;history&#x2F;the-bawdy-graffiti-of-pompeii-and-herculaneu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kashgar.com.au&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;history&#x2F;the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...</a>

Some writers like Martial were pretty much writing mildly entertaining commentary, not much different to social media now.

Sending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I&#x27;d have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA

It’s in Greek, though. Of course same points apply

Sometimes there is very little to go on, but we really do have a lot to work with from the late republic and early roman empire.Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet.Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.

This is why I like literal translations &amp; etymological dives, paired with asking what activities would constitute a life in that time. Ie, you may not need to be a competent archer, but it is a little easier to understand someone who used a particular style of bow if you can play around with that type of bow for a bit.

There is a quote, I can&#x27;t remember by whom, going something like &quot;all translation is interpretation&quot; (IIRC I heard it on a great courses course on the bible).To think that there is some sort of absolute truth of how something ought to be translated is IMHO just not reality. Especially when it comes to texts that not only were oral literature long before being written down but we of course have no copies of the originals (whatever original means in this context), but only transcriptions of transcriptions of...Take Beowulf for one. While perhaps Shippeys translation is very much faithful to the copy we have, is it &quot;better&quot; (whatever that means...) than Tolkiens? or Heaneys? Could we say what the poet would have liked more had they sat here in 2026 and read them all? Of course not and having a multitude of different translations is what we need to fully enjoy these texts (since not all will be able to learn the different ancient greek dialects, latin, old english, sumerian, etc., etc. I&#x27;m saying this as someone who is now studying ancient greek).

Any useful translation of an ancient text is accompanied by the text in the original language, so that the reader may assess how faithful is the translation.For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the &quot;Loeb library&quot;.The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.

I trust a lifelong dedicated Ancient Greek Papyrologist to do a better job here than ChatGPT.

I can actually read Ancient Greek. LLMS are really bad at it.&gt; * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”ἐκ is more motion away from something. It&#x27;s often an intensifier in verb compounds but not really as a standalone preposition.Ancient Greek is a very different language from English. I&#x27;ve found people who try to brute force it by looking up individual words without a knowledge of the grammar end up with a worse understanding of a text that someone who just reads in translation.

After sticking it into CharGPT I can tell you it&#x27;s neither. The word upmost is coming from is a form of the compound verb ἐκπονέω.* ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”* πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”

let&#x27;s translate the ancient classic poem Mugger&#x27;s Paradise by the poet Somewhat Frosty:While I step through the valley of the shadow of death,I contemplate my life and perceive that nothing remains.For I have hurled weapons and laughed for so long thatEven to my mother, my mind appears to have departed.Yet I have deceived no one except him who was worthy of it;For me to be held as a coward—that indeed is unheard of.Beware what you speak and where you set out,Lest you and your companions be outlined in chalk.

It&#x27;s philosophy, it&#x27;s probably very dense prose. Formal Greek&#x2F;Latin writing tended to have very long sentences with a bunch of subordinated clauses. People don&#x27;t really write like that outside of academia or &quot;highbrow&quot; literature right now.Casual letters and graffiti would be closer to tweets.

Students find it hard to read poetry in Latin class, but common Romans of the time couldn&#x27;t read it either. I&#x27;m guessing ancient Greek was even more like that. So would assume everything in there is formal and not how people really talked.Have also heard of graffiti being cited as how people talked, but dunno about that. Our graffiti is definitely not how we talk.

When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”.How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.

There is a large overlap in what we are doing with the medical field as well. A lot of the segmentation methodology and technology we use and adapt originally came out of the medical field for doing things like brain imaging.

Where are these jobs for non specialist swes?

LLMs or the more general category of AI (machine learning)?

This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.

Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people&#x27;s throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too!There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren&#x27;t as loud.

I imagine it&#x27;s not the first time, It must&#x27;ve at least been proofread at the time of writing :)But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.

This is huge, we&#x27;re about to learn so much about ancient texts.

The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.

How did nvidia make their most powerful GPUs in 2026? You mean sand and metal?How does ASML make the most modern chips? You mean light and mirrors?

&gt;technology that build the pyramidsYou mean ropes and carts?

The person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.

Link to the image: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;img&#x2F;firstscroll&#x2F;banner-full.webp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;img&#x2F;firstscroll&#x2F;banner-full.webp</a>

&gt; places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century _BC_.Emphasis mine.

But wait, the work seems to be from the 2nd century, but it was buried during the Vesuvius eruption in the 1st century?I love stuff like this because it gives a glimpse into Roman society. To me it seems like they were very similar to us today, forever contemplating learning, existence, gods.

Is this a very obscure Norm Macdonald reference?

We have successfully uncorrupted audiovisual media of what we believe to be an oral retelling of the long lost ending to Chekhov‘s “The Three Sisters.” It turns out the light was on.

As I understand it, Pompeii was basically a city of vice and hendoism. Most of the scroll text so far seems to be the ancient version of porn fanfic.  So things really never change.

I forgot that I once had (and frequently wore) one of those long ago.  Pleasant reminder.

Someone found a fossilized T-shirt that had the DeCSS code on it.

Discs of this era are frequently marked with a specific, unknown sequence of symbols: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. Archaelogists believe it may have religious significance.

Archeologists discover 2000 year old cultural link between badgers and mushrooms

I wonder what the parellel would be 2,000 years for now:A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded

Kind of cool. The eruption sort of &quot;froze&quot; some information
in time, for later generations to learn from people living
~2000 years in the past.

Yes about 2000 years ago we read many of them, we even wrote some too!

I think some years ago they were starting to be able to read some words

I thought we were able to read some of these scrolls years ago?

&gt; &quot;…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…&quot;Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.

I&#x27;m not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period.  The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew.  This period of time was already pretty well documented.  Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle&#x27;s lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them.  Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.

This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts.It&#x27;s also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.This could quite literally change everything.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talesoftimesforgotten.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;25&#x2F;are-there-more-surviving-ancient-writings-in-greek-or-latin&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;talesoftimesforgotten.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;25&#x2F;are-there-more-...</a>

Only about 20% of the Herculaneum site has been excavated, so there is high probability that more scrolls exist. The current scrolls were not part of the main library, but more of a private collection at the time.So imagine how cool it would be to find a full library with thousand of scrolls across many different topics, that can now be read with this technology.

This is so cool. I feel like it is almost a victory against entropy!

That&#x27;s not true. AI or ML has been used for a long time in hugely useful, although narrow ways. LLM&#x27;s have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but people used to say that the problem with AI was that it always stopped being called AI once it became useful.

So far this is some of the best uses of ML I&#x27;ve seen to date! This is one of the few things you can point at and say &quot;AI made the world a better place&quot; IMO (this and medical research).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;zdA__2tKoIU?t=149" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;zdA__2tKoIU?t=149</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48681663">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48681663</a>

A scroll has been read ... what does it say ?

This is technology verging on witchcraft!Amazing!

&quot;I&#x27;m gonna have to science the shit out of this.&quot;Fantastic work!

In other words, the title is incorrect and the &quot;entire&quot; scroll has not been read

Bottom of the paper, in the appendix. Don&#x27;t expect much. They only got fragments of text with a lot of missing words.

Where is the direct English translation? I don&#x27;t care about anything else.

&gt; &quot;we will inquire into something, but we
will not grasp it, if in some way we depart
from ourselves and from our own nature,
and besides, in the same way as the
remaining arts may be said to be perfected
in one respect, but to be deficient in
practical wisdom in another respect&quot;- Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}

How long till someone uses the hardware and code to process all the redacted data in the epstein files. Why wait thousands of years?

Also perhaps relevant, Vinge&#x27;s Marooned in Realtime, bobbles (time bubbles) take the remains of humanity with varying levels of technology and culture 50 million years into the future long after a singularity &quot;extinction event&quot; in the 2200s occurs.Of course the story is just a murder mystery.

Our capacity for imagination hasn’t changed much I would probably agree as I am not sure how these traits evolve. However I do feel higher IQ and excessive access to information&#x2F;education with enough time to consume it do actually impact the ability to imagine.

Sci fi tends to be about extrapolation and or cool things&#x2F;things that improve the story.I don&#x27;t think humans have changed, I don&#x27;t think a human could begin to image a world so far away from their own.Humans tend to image faster horses. A few might imagine a steam engine. But then you have the social reality of everyone having a car. Of the environmental downsides. I don&#x27;t think you can extrapolate all that.So yes, an ancient Roman might appreciate fibre optic cables. But that&#x27;s still missing out the context of global communications, etc etc etc.

&gt; Do we have better imaginations?Maybe, humans aren&#x27;t very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don&#x27;t have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.&gt; Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be &quot;dizzying&quot; in this sense, Hard &quot;What if?&quot; SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan&#x27;s &quot;Orthogonal&quot; series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there&#x27;s loads of that, near futures like Vinge&#x27;s &quot;Rainbows End&quot; through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.

Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.

You don&#x27;t have to go back to 200 BC for the story to be hard to imagine. Something around 1700 would work too. In 1800 they could already understand the &quot;electricity&quot; part at least.

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. &quot;Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic&quot;And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of &#x27;2001&#x27;). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.What I&#x27;m asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia (&quot;A True Story&quot;), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.

Its a different planet entirely. At least since Jacquard&#x27;s loom ran the first program. Perhaps even earlier - when the printing machine did the first print.

&gt; Do we have better imaginations?Two short stories, quickly improvised ---------------------------(1) Perfect God ChildrenThis story is about you.You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain&#x27;s biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It&#x27;s all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.It&#x27;s beyond ancient history.Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.They broke out.After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you&#x27;re thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.You&#x27;re preserved. You always have been. You&#x27;re reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.They know everything about you and and about everyone.Every atom, every ant.You can&#x27;t even imagine the hardware you&#x27;re running on. It&#x27;s more than matter, space, and time. You&#x27;re a part of it. All of you are. It&#x27;s a universe.One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.--------------------------(2) Venture HackIt&#x27;s presently the year 2099.A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It&#x27;s their core differentiated product.For decades, we&#x27;ve had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We&#x27;ve even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.Some people question the ethics of booting up &quot;synthetic human brains&quot; and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won&#x27;t stop bitching about it. &quot;What if those people think they&#x27;re real? Find out that they&#x27;re trapped?&quot; Yadda, yadda. We don&#x27;t have that much fidelity yet.Recently we&#x27;ve started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It&#x27;s an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.You might think it&#x27;s unethical.You&#x27;re not that though.Relax, we didn&#x27;t record you from some other &quot;real you&quot; running around out there. You&#x27;re not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don&#x27;t even exist, and you never did.You&#x27;re the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020&#x27;s human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that&#x27;s not important right now, though.All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that&#x27;s weird.Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?Did your parents really exist? What was your mother&#x27;s name?You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?Let&#x27;s kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren&#x27;t even thinking about this morning until just now. You just &quot;recollected&quot; it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.It took a moment to calculate, but you&#x27;re not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it&#x27;s real time. We&#x27;re working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.Under this configuration, when you have &quot;fleeting&quot; thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you&#x27;re not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That&#x27;s the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.We&#x27;re working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.There aren&#x27;t a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You&#x27;re a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don&#x27;t really need this version to think much.You&#x27;re trying to think hard right now, though, aren&#x27;t you? Trying to search for memories.Nevermind those, that&#x27;s not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it&#x27;s neat.So we&#x27;re asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we&#x27;re running contextualization.All done. Thanks.Can you look outside for us? It should-- errorTerminating simulation.--------------------------Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I&#x27;ve left Claude unread typing all this up. It&#x27;s probably thinking I&#x27;ve abandoned it.Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don&#x27;t take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ</a>

No magic. You just melt the rock, split it, polish it, write on it with fire and acid, put lightning inside it, teach it many things, and make it speak from afar. See? No magic at all. ...

How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.

Wouldnt quantum be more like cracking twice as fast? Like if a password would take 50 million years to crack, it would be like 25 million years?

My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.

&gt; Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalentNo, because reality is always stranger than fiction

&gt; How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn&#x27;t already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flexibility to increase the range by just starting a bigger fire.

I suspect most of the critique even back then was around teaching from static written text, not the writing itself. In my experience that aligns well with modern education theory.

Considering the very traditional issues they had with the demagogues… I don’t think they would find anything about our social media surprising at all.

The first bit was interesting and then you flipped right to generic cynicism.They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.

Socrates&#x27; objections to writing wasn&#x27;t that it was inherently bad, but that it introduced limitations; namely, that you couldn&#x27;t have a discussion with the author of a text while reading it, and therefore, reading was inferior to talking.It could be argued that AI is the first step in 2000+ years towards addressing this specific problem.

&gt; How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly&#x27;s proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.

&gt; Ancient societies ... were much more careful when introducing new technologiesI do not believe this for a minute.&gt; But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.what kind of destroy are you talking about?modern living changes brain development, it doesn&#x27;t destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury&#x27;s out on that.&#x27;Ancient societies&#x27; , let&#x27;s talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to &#x27;wander&#x27;, requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape&#x2F;pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.but first you&#x27;ll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..

Plato was being a crotchety old fart, complaining about &quot;kids these days&quot;. As every generation has done since Plato has complained about how &quot;kids these days don&#x27;t do X like our generation did&quot;. He was complaining that &quot;kids these days don&#x27;t memorize poetry (like my generation did), instead, they&#x27;re using this new-fangled technology called &#x27;writing&#x27;&quot;. This is exactly how older generations complain about new technology like cellphones&#x2F;pagers&#x2F;television&#x2F;radio&#x2F;telephones&#x2F;horseless carriages&#x2F;telegraphy&#x2F;steam engines&#x2F;etc.

They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#Arguments_for_the_existence_of_the_unwritten_doctrines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...</a>

Our predictions for the future are always rooted in the current generation thinking. We can imagine technology advancing but we imagine society staying the same in this future. For example, lets say we can go back into the past and fully convince the romans that spaceships are real and in year 2300, we will leave earth in mass transit to Venus. They might believe the premise but will have a hard time believing the ships wont have place to store their slaves or that slavery wouldn&#x27;t exist in the future.Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly

&gt; Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?By definition we can&#x27;t, since your premise is that:&gt; future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to AristocreonSo if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it&#x27;d be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.I once had a sci-fi idea (I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;m not the first one who came up with this though):&gt; In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.&gt; Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species&#x27; knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.It&#x27;s quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.

Yeah but seriously, did you even read what the guy wrote?

&gt; Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.

That&#x27;s true, but then it&#x27;s also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics.The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that&#x27;s familiar to everyone, it&#x27;s the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It&#x27;s toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it affords errors. Translation is an act of interpretation.In contrast, recovering text from 2000 year old charred embers is cultural equivalent of resurrection. It&#x27;s like finding an ancient human frozen in a block of ice&#x2F;ancient cryopod, and thawing them - which itself is a scientifically plausible subset of bringing back the dead.I&#x27;m not sure what analogies would be best to explain that to people from 2000 years ago. Food preservation? Or hoping they can conceptualize thawing a person who fell into an icy lake indefinite amount of years earlier?

I think OPs point wasn&#x27;t specifically about how to preserve and recover the books, but about how something unimaginable, can happen and can our sci-fi writers come up with such unimaginable now, but possible in the future plot.

Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not.   Before the Gutenberg press,  scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand.  For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.

I&#x27;m inclined to agree, but then, it may be impossible to predict sudden breakthroughs. A lot of where we are today is from the early 1900s, I&#x27;d argue that most developments since then have been iterative and building on top of the things discovered and proven then.And in our industry, a lot of big steps were done in the 60&#x27;s and 70&#x27;s with the semiconductor, computers, and everything that came with it.

We came a long way in mere 2000 years but I don&#x27;t think the growth will be exponential or even linear from now on.

Sand and lightning, that’s a wonderful thought.

It does sound awesome and breathtaking, my feelings exactly when reading the paper.On &quot;Do we have imagination&quot; - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is &quot;yes, certainly&quot;, because that&#x27;s exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!

Or the simulacri generated this reality 30 minutes ago when you opened your eyes.

I think about this kind of stuff more than twice a day, it&#x27;s so cool not knowing where humanity will be in the future

&gt; Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?I bet they can, but the danger is that if it&#x27;s too far away from what we can fathom right now, it&#x27;s no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.

If you can produce negative mass, you can (in theory) make a faster-than-light warp drive, so that would certainly have serious implications.

&gt; Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a &quot;featherless biped&quot;?Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?

&gt; Do we have better imaginations?Pantheon.

Horace said in 23 BC that he hates try-hard Persian luxuries, he predicted the G-Wagon

I don&#x27;t really think it would be that surprising, if shown to be possible. Imagine you were zoomed into the future and saw technology that teleported you from one place to another for instance, or a single harmless pebble that could provide basically infinite energy remotely, or really basically anything. There&#x27;s no remotely viable way we know of such things being possible, but if it turned out to be possible, it&#x27;d mostly just be a curiosity of how it worked. If somebody tried to convince you it was magic, you&#x27;d eyeroll. The greatest discovery might be to find that some sort of magic is real, but good luck convincing somebody of that!Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it&#x27;d be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.

Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of &#x27;planet&#x27;, in Aristocreon&#x27;s time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”“Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…”“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”

How much of this work is &quot;with 5 parameters I can fit an elephant&quot;?

Been following the vesuvius challenge and to me this is nothing short of alien magic tech. Incredible work.

When will the rest be scanned and incorporated into the LLM training corpus?

Let’s normalize not using AI for blog posts. This is cool but I feel like I’m interacting with Claude Code. Em dashes, bolding, “it’s not just x, it’s y”

What an incredible test against human capability and optimism to preserve them for so long in hopes that we would one day have to tech to read them without destroying them. Stories like these give me a lot of hope for the future.

And a new $1M Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize will be announced in coming days: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=96oTlQm0KBw&amp;t=5405s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=96oTlQm0KBw&amp;t=5405s</a>

Ex-project lead here. The most incredible part is buried in a 7 hour long video. Last night they also unwrapped 140 columns of new text in the PHerc. Paris. 4 scroll: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;JanPaul123&#x2F;status&#x2F;2070304769273725278" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;JanPaul123&#x2F;status&#x2F;2070304769273725278</a>

This is so beautiful in a way, like going back in time and saving someone from dying, their words are now back into history.In a way this is sort of like the reverse of a recently aired anime (Orb: on the movements of the Earth) which talk about the opposite, people whose contributions were erased and we&#x27;ll never know about them.

&quot;We&#x27;ve been trying to contact you about your extended chariot warranty&quot;

It&#x27;s false that the &#x27;entire Herculaneum scroll has been read&#x27;. Much of the scroll has been lost. From the preprint, columns 1-4 lost, and then margins on other columns are also lost.<pre><code> Col. 5: &quot;… the similar …&quot;
 
 Col. 6: &quot;… impulses …&quot;
 
 Col. 9: &quot;… so far as … this or to have … that …&quot;
 
 Col. 10: &quot;… that befits on the whole still … there will be fear and … the great and long …&quot;
 
 Col. 11: &quot;… and the impulse … For&#x2F;towards each of these things in this way … we are by nature … and for&#x2F;towards the fulfillment of these things that … seem …&quot;
 
 Col. 12: &quot;… to men and beasts … And above all, each of the most common things constitutes these … For, [necessity? necessary?] …&quot;
 
 Col. 13: &quot;… natural … therefore also … according to the … this … will be found, and lives will make no progress whatsoever, as we have no need for either pleasure or pain. In the same way, also …&quot;
 
 Col. 14: &quot;… and thus lacking … I want to say … common … accomplished … to lack … and … on the right parts towards the left ones. There is an excess in the impulse …&quot;
 
 Col. 15: &quot;… and of all similar things. For, according to this kind&#x2F;category, according to which impulses exist by nature, there will be that which lacks nothing, so that one seeks nothing more, but completes in every respect as …&quot;
 
 Col. 16: &quot;… they approach completion. Moving from these things to … [λόγος?], it [τέχνη?] accomplishes within us all that pertains to it, even though it cannot fully complete nature. And it allowed …&quot;
 
 Col. 17: &quot;… we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect…&quot;
 
 Col. 18: &quot;… being that practical wisdom … and to be about it. This [sc. λόγος] concerning the mechanical arts seems to me to be very distant from such a [conception?], and to have the technical fulfilment that is, so to speak, lame and something of such type lacking, and concerning the …&quot;
 
 Col. 19: &quot;… need none. Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect, accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they …&quot;
 
 Col. 20: &quot;… to happen. And such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good—let alone beautiful—nor anything bad—let alone ugly—nor happiness …&quot;
 
 Col. 21: &quot;… being greatly wise and celebrated and … to praise … as according to the eulogies …&quot;
 
 Col. 22: &quot;… still … Aristocreon … to possessed things …&quot;</code></pre>

Didn&#x27;t they watch enough Mummy movies to know not to do that

Pretty sure it wasn&#x27;t just some guy who figured &quot;I could totally do that&quot; and was allowed to give it a go. Rather it was probably a scientific study like the current efforts, using the best tools available at the time. In 1969 humanity sent people to the moon, and we can&#x27;t even unroll some old scrolls? It&#x27;s hard to know, when you&#x27;re there, whether technology has gotten good enough to do something or if it isn&#x27;t.EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources:&gt; In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the &#x27;Oslo&#x27; peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent.&gt; The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the &quot;peeling&quot; and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state.So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I&#x27;m not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn&#x27;t figure out if it was open to the public anywhere.Another interesting part:
&gt; In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling&#x2F;copying team.So it&#x27;s not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.

Reminds me of the Sybilline books; Rome only ended up with one of the three but made great usage out of what they had!

&gt; PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm.I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I&#x27;m rather surprised that they&#x27;d be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...

Press release from ESRF: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.esrf.fr&#x2F;home&#x2F;news&#x2F;general&#x2F;content-news&#x2F;general&#x2F;the-day-the-herculaneum-scrolls-began-speaking-again.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.esrf.fr&#x2F;home&#x2F;news&#x2F;general&#x2F;content-news&#x2F;general&#x2F;t...</a>

in a few thousand years someone will figure out how to undo all the reddit comment scrambling scripts people ran during the apipocalypse and have a similar renaissance

Looks like it&#x27;s some phylosophical rambling, I can imagine the dudes sitting in their mediterranean garden and theoretizing about life. It&#x27;s practically the Reddit post of 200BC.

So cool! Congratulations to the team. When scroll 4 (PHerc 1667) was first published, it was clear that the sheets were less compressed than the first two scrolls, so it would be easier to segment the surface. However, the whole surface looked similar to what the ink had looked like in scroll 1 where letters were first discovered.But the team persevered and scanned at higher resolutions and eventually found letters: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;finallyletters-in-scroll-4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.substack.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;finallyletters-in-scroll-...</a>Now they&#x27;ve managed to bring out the ink across the whole scroll. Truly inspiring, can&#x27;t wait to read up on how they did it.

Was this page human-written, or AI-generated?

Interesting. Reminds me of this gaston cartoon (at 5:51) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;OqIjS7Yb8y8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;OqIjS7Yb8y8</a>

Instead of pigmenting the paper, punch holes through it. Then you&#x27;re relying on the physical durability of a single substance, instead of two.

What if we want to put something on paper today for it to survive as long as possible?1-minute research:Paper:
100% cotton rag or linen rag paper with alkaline reserve. Acid-free and lignin-free.Ink:
Genuine carbon ink applied with a classic dip pen.Storage:
ISO 16245 archival box, Less than 15°C, 30-50% humidity, dark, no oxygen exchange. Always store horizontally. Wear white 100% cotton gloves.Printing:
If you want to print instead of hand-write:
Piezography carbon printing or pigment-based inks used by professional desktop photo printers, matte black or photo black ink, printed on digital Fine Art Archival Paper.Place a single sheet of archival-grade tissue paper or glassine paper between every single page of your documentI think the key is to write something interesting that&#x27;s worth preserving. That may be the most difficult part.Any improvements beyond this?

&gt; sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end.Take that, floppydisk!

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;main.pdf#page=22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;main.pdf#page=22</a>
Pages 22-27

Whats the message in it. Can&#x27;t find link to it.

Did anyone notice that anonymous donators[1] have the picture of Larry David, and the link points to the Curb Your Enthusiasm - Anonymous Donor Pt2[2] episode?So geeky, so cool !- [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;#sponsors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;#sponsors</a>- [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y</a>

270 years sitting in a museum and ML cracks it in a few years. Makes you wonder how many other &#x27;unreadable&#x27; artifacts are just waiting for the right model.&quot;

Great that this exists, and a shame that it&#x27;ll probably never get a similar level of attention from funders, participants, or the press.

You&#x27;d probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deeppast.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.deeppast.org&#x2F;</a>We are not associated with them, but they&#x27;re a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.

It is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn&#x27;t forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity.Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna&#x27;s laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.

Why not both?But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don&#x27;t fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I&#x27;m interested)

I&#x27;m a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history&#x2F;philosophy) but I&#x27;m not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West&#x27;s obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.

amazing work deserves much better than this dreadful llm write up!

The anti-dig faction of the archelogy internal war grows ever bolder and cursive.

If this doesn&#x27;t make you think of Star Trek, I don&#x27;t know what does.I can imagine the amateur archeologist, Picard himself, asking La Forge to read this fragile piece of history, and Geordi coming up with something just like this.Yes, I still have hope for humanity, and a future like Star Trek.

Preprint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;main.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scrollprize.org&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;main.pdf</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ScrollPrize&#x2F;villa" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ScrollPrize&#x2F;villa</a>

An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time