Ancient, damaged Roman scrolls have been deciphered using AI

“I can’t believe it worked!” says Nat Friedman, co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, which offered $1m in prizes to anyone who could use artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher papyrus scrolls carbonised by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. But work it did. On February 5th Mr Friedman announced that a three-person team had been awarded $700,000 for successfully extracting four passages of text, each at least 140 characters long, and with at least 85% of the characters legible, from a scroll known as Banana Boy. The three winners, Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, are all computer-science students.

The scroll is one of hundreds found in the library of a Roman villa in Herculaneum, which is thought to have belonged to the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Along with hundreds of other scrolls in the villa’s library, it was damaged by scorching gases that engulfed the town during the same eruption that also buried the nearby town of Pompeii.