Inside the AI Competition That Decoded an Ancient Herculaneum Scroll
The Herculaneum scrolls, charred and preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, were unreadable—until now
On a warm Saturday night at the end of August last year, Luke Farritor, an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska, was sitting alone in a corner at a house party in Omaha when his iPhone pinged.
The music was booming, and Farritor, 21 years old at the time with a boyish face and black rectangular glasses, was surrounded by other students drinking and mingling. He opened the message. It was from Ben Kyles, a 45-year-old computer scientist and pianist from British Columbia, known to Farritor as “Hari Seldon”—Kyles’s online avatar, named for a character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. Kyles had some news to share.
He had just finished digitally unrolling some high-resolution scans of carbonized papyrus. He’d uploaded the images, he said, to a shared server. “Dude,” Farritor replied, “this is awesome. I’ll run it very soon.”
Kyles’s papyrus was from Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town on the Bay of Naples, at the base of Mount Vesuvius, that is home to the only preserved library from classical antiquity.
The collection of papyri—from which about 1,800 mostly unreadable scrolls and fragments have so far been extracted—was interred under 60 feet of material deposited by pyroclastic flows, at temperatures greater than 900 degrees Fahrenheit, during the same eruption that destroyed Pompeii in C.E.
- Without enough oxygen to burn, the scrolls were baked into charcoal—a blessing because it allowed them to join the small trove of papyri that has managed to endure since antiquity, all of it protected from humidity in some way or another, whether inhumed in Egyptian sands or singed by fire. But it also means they cannot be unrolled without turning to dust.
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