An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.

Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.

A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.

Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rendering with no ML based ink detection in the input.

The input is 3d chunks of reconstructed CT data from our scans. I can't remember the specifics but maybe enough voxels for .5mm^3 at a time or so? They're all available for free from https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum... . Our trained models are all available at https://huggingface.co/scrollprize

Just as with redacted documents (consistently blocked terms) or bad OCR jobs (wrong or missing characters), even if only a certain percentage comes out unmangled it is more readable than having no data at all.

A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].

[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11642687/2449774

Yeah. There was a weird Xerox printer bug that swapped digits (turning 6s into 8s) on scanned documents caused by the JBIG2 image format [1].

[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?

Yes, there are a very great many!

The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.

Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.

So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.

David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.

These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.

To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.

Given this.

> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.

They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.

Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.

Probably something along the lines of "finally, now it looks like a coherent piece of text. I wonder what it says".

but that was a copy

There's also the Telegony. Odysseus has a son through Circe who winds up killing him and marrying Penelope. Odysseus son through Penelope, Telemachus, marries Circe. There's some wild stuff that doesn't survive.

The unfortunate part is the lack of anything else therein, not that it's Epicurean philosophy.