'Vesuvio Challenge' where you can get 30 million yen if you decipher the ancient Roman scroll buried in volcanic ash



The `` Vesuvius Challenge '', a contest to decipher ancient documents excavated from the ancient Roman city buried in ash by the eruption

of Mount Vesuvius with the power of technology, started on March 15, 2023. A prize of $ 250,000 (about 33 million yen) will be awarded to the team that successfully deciphers it in 2023.

Vesuvius Challenge
https://scrollprize.org/

The goal of the challenge this time is to decipher the ancient Roman scroll 'Papyrus' excavated from the ruins of the city of Herculaneum , which is registered as a World Heritage Site along with Pompeii.

In Herculaneum, which was submerged in volcanic ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, there is a mansion believed to have belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, also known as ' Papyrus Villa '. Many 'Herculaneum Papyrus' books were excavated from the library.

A reproduction of Papyrus-so.


by

Rocío Espín

However, the papyrus has become charred and brittle, and many early attempts to open and read it have resulted in the papyrus being shattered. Therefore, Dr. Brent Shields of the University of Kentucky, who has a track record of successfully deciphering the `` En Gedi Document '' discovered in the Dead Sea, turned his attention to X-ray fluoroscopy technology.

Dr. Shields has been researching papyrus scanning since 2019, but in early 2023 he succeeded in identifying some of the papyrus characters, making great progress in his research.



This achievement made deciphering suddenly more realistic, but the scrolls were so tightly wound and crooked that the characters were distorted, and the data scanned from them was blurry and unreadable to the human eye. . The research team of Dr. Shields and others is working on decoding with a machine learning model, but the model still needs improvement.



In this way, the EduceLab team at the University of Kentucky, led by Dr. Shields, and Mr. Nat Friedman, an investor and former CEO of GitHub, played a central role in gathering information about people who could decipher the papyrus and achievements that could lead to decipherment. This time's 'Vesuvio Challenge' will be held to give a prize to the person who raised it.

The target of the challenge is two intact papyrus. Entrant teams will be provided with download links for the entire papyrus scan data 'full scroll' (4.7 TB) and three fragment scan data 'fragments' (1.6 TB).



By June 14, 2023, the team that was able to identify the position of the ink that wrote the letters on the papyrus will receive a prize of $ 50,000 (about 6.6 million yen), and the team that succeeded in reading the papyrus by December 31st. In addition to awarding a prize of 150,000 dollars (about 20 million yen), a special prize of 50,000 dollars is also prepared, and the team that first deciphers the scroll alone will receive a total of 250,000 dollars. Become.

Friedman said on Twitter, ``Use particle accelerators and AI to decipher the lost library of a fallen empire. For 275 years, people have been trying to read the Herculaneum Papyrus. Let's do it in 2018,' he announced the Vesuvius Challenge.

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