A Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

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

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

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.

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.

For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research)

I'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.

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.

I imagine it's not the first time, It must'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.

Link to the image: https://scrollprize.org/img/firstscroll/banner-full.webp

Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum.

A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?

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'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't as loud.

This is huge, we're about to learn so much about ancient texts.

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

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.