Inside the AI-Powered Race to Decode Ancient Roman Scrolls скачать в хорошем качестве

Inside the AI-Powered Race to Decode Ancient Roman Scrolls

On a Saturday night in late August, Luke Farritor, a 21-year old computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was on his way home from a party at a friend's house in Omaha when he saw something on his phone that he says almost caused him to break into tears and fall to the floor. Farritor had spent the last six months poring over 3D X-rays of ancient scrolls, often for more than 40 hours per week, all alongside internships and his studies. While he was at the party he had received a message informing him that new segments of scanned and virtually flattened scrolls had just been uploaded. With the music blaring around him, he logged onto his PC remotely to set the AI model that he’d built to detect ink from previous scroll scans to work on the new segments and rejoined the party. After driving home, on the walk back to his college dorm from the parking lot, Farritor remembered the scrolls and checked his phone. On his phone display were three ancient Greek letters—π, ο, ρ (pi, omicron, rho). Farritor was the first to read the letters in nearly 2,000 years. “I completely freaked out,” he tells TIME. Farritor, who on Oct. 12 won $40,000 for his breakthrough, is one of thousands of competitors racing to read the Herculaneum papyri, ancient Roman scrolls buried and preserved by a volcanic eruption. Farritor’s work builds on the work of the other competitors, for which 36 prizes have been handed out in total. On messaging platform Discord the atmosphere among competitors is collaborative—they share code and emerging results from their work alongside photos of pumpkins they bought and poems inspired by the competition—even as the dash for the $700,000 grand prize intensifies. The competition is organized by the academic who invented virtual unwrapping and a tech investor who became obsessed with the Romans during the Covid-19 lockdown. Whoever wins, a bounty of ancient knowledge will soon be breached. Read more about the Vesuvius Challenge: https://ti.me/3tP8WA5 Subscribe to TIME Breaking News YouTube Channel ►►: https://ti.me/3ROMUXY Subscribe to TIME’s YouTube channel ►► http://ti.me/subscribe-time Subscribe to TIME: https://ti.me/3E3UCqt Get the day’s top headlines to your inbox, curated by TIME editors: http://ti.me/the-brief Follow us: Twitter: https://ti.me/3xTVwSk Facebook: https://ti.me/3xWI2Fg Instagram: https://ti.me/3dO9Rcc