First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years
13 comments
·February 5, 2025dang
NaOH
Additional backstory:
First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37857417 - Oct 2023 (210 comments)
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39261861 - Feb 2024 (216 comments)
generalizations
> The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.
> But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.
"scientists"
They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids.
This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/
gkbrk
College kids can be scientists. Anyone doing science is a scientist.
There are even middle-school kids doing science. Or random adults with non-STEM jobs collecting data as a hobby for Citizen Science.
We should be careful not to gatekeep the words science or scientist. The more mad scientists we have throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks, the more things we can discover.
generalizations
I absolutely agree, and the (possibly badly said) intention was to highlight that credit is not being given where credit is due. "scientists" being a way to obscure the actual people who pulled this off.
hinkley
You’re gonna be shocked to learn how many research papers the “primary author” is the faculty advisor, that the second author is a grad student who wrote the entire paper, and the professor only observed/inspired the project and proofread the paper.
null
manymany
[flagged]
JoeDaDude
You may, or may not be asking in jest. In any case, I think you are alluding to the fact that Luke Farritor, winner of the Vesuvius challenge in 2023 and former SpaceX intern, is now employed by Elon Musk in the Department of Government Efficiency, ostensibly to find waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending.
lexicality
well, that's cursed knowledge
lexicality
Presumably yes, if they were written on papyrus, set on fire and then buried in volcanic ash for a thousand years first.
Possibly more efficient options are available...
Recent and related:
News from Scroll 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)