As you can imagine, the folded papyrus unearthed in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum is quite difficult to open, let alone read, given that the parchment was buried under piles of volcanic ash at Mount Vesuvius for nearly 2,000 years. path.

Scientists at the University of Kentucky launched the Vesuvius challenge in March by publishing thousands of X-ray images of charred Herculaneum scrolls and rudimentary artificial intelligence software that could be used to interpret the scans.

Now two students have received first prize: Luc Faritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a biorobotics graduate student at the Free University in Germany.

Both Faritor and Nader independently identified the word “πορυρας” (or “porphyries” using modern Greek symbols) as a word meaning “purple,” making it the first complete word decoded by artificial intelligence software.

In ancient Rome, purple was an important color that often symbolized wealth and status. It is thought that the word may mean robe or rank, but further analysis of the scrolls will be required to know for sure.

Faritor trained a machine learning model on the “crackle” pattern (a pattern that could indicate an ink stroke) discovered on parchment in August. As the AI ​​discovered more cracks and ink strokes, new training data meant it became better at detecting other patterns, eventually giving rise to the word “porphyry”.

Nader also used a machine learning approach but trained the AI ​​on shapes in images that resembled letters. Again, machine learning, which allows the AI ​​to identify new patterns and show what those patterns should look like, was able to pick out the word porphyras and some of the letters around it.

Given enough training data, these AI engines can detect very subtle texture changes in X-ray images and reveal ink strokes invisible to the human eye. Researchers hope more will emerge soon.

The grand prize of the Challenge of Vesuvius ($700,000 attached) will be awarded to the person who can read four or more passages from one of these scrolls. If you think you have what it takes to decipher the text, you can even try doing it yourself.

Buried after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, the scrolls were not discovered until workers in the 18th century came across the ruins of a luxury villa; This villa may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. – Mother-in-law

Unfortunately, very few such ancient texts have survived to the present day. If these scrolls could be read without opening them—which would most likely cause them to crumble to dust—we could gain valuable information about life and learning in the first century. Source