Offering $250,000 to Anyone Who Can Read a 2,000-Year-Old Charred Manuscript in Pompeii

A team of scientists from the University of KentuckyIn the US, they’re offering $250,000 in prizes to anyone who can read a set of 2,000-year-old manuscripts that were charred during the Vesuvius eruption.

When the explosion of volcano devastated Pompeii in the year 79 AD C., hundreds of texts of the Library of Herculaneum they were buried and charred by ash and smoking gases.

They resurfaced in 1752 in a villa near the Bay of Naples believed to belong to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, but its contents remain a mystery as scientists deemed them too fragile to deploy.

Now, the research team has launched a competition proving that a artificial intelligence system can extract letters and symbols from images of X-ray of the documents. Such a program can read the ink on the surface without having to open the scrolls of manuscripts.

“We demonstrated how to read herculaneum inksaid the lead researcher Professor Brent sealscomputer scientist at the University of Kentucky.

Seales explains that thanks to this discovery it was possible to unveil a large part of the manuscript collection. “It gives us the opportunity to do that they reveal up to 80% of the entire collection. We built the ship. Now we want everyone to get on and sail with us,” she said.

The researchers released the software along with three papyrus fragments to help other scientists decipher the documents. The goal is to break them.

“We are launching a competition so that we can expand our capacity to extract more and more text,” he says.

The prize will go to the one who will read the first four passages of text from the inner layers of the scrolls. by the end of 2023.

Each research team will compete for a US$150,000 prize.

Another $100,000 Prizes will also be available to those who can detect ink on the rolls of 3D X-ray scans.