First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years
www.bbc.co.uk
The document charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is being 'unwrapped' using X-ray scans and AI.

It’s a 10m papyrus scroll from Herculaneum, one of the cities buried by Vesuvius’ volcanic ash in 79 CE. It’s fully carbonised but they’re using a synchrotron to create a 3D model of the scroll without damaging it. Then they’re using AI (pattern recognition AI, perhaps?) to detect signs of ink, so they can reconstruct the text itself.

The project lead Stephen Parson claims that they’re confident that they “will be able to read pretty much the whole scroll in its entirety”. And so far it seems to be a work of philosophy.

  • @ContramuffinEnglish
    3•22 hours ago

    My position has always been that AI is useful given these conditions:

    1. Both the input and output of the AI are defined and limited in scope (ie, designed to serve a specific purpose rather than be multi-purpose)
    2. It is difficult or impossible to come up with an algorithm that can do the same thing (ie, too many variables to be easily analyzed)
    3. How the output is derived is unimportant or less important than the final output itself

    This is a genuinely good application of AI:

    1. The AI is designed to identify and read text in scrolls
    2. The combination of low signal in the scan and requirement for image recognition capabilities makes AI perhaps the only feasible solution for the problem
    3. We care about the text itself, not why we think the text is what it is