AI Reads Burnt Roman Scroll Buried by Vesuvius

On February 5, 2024, the Vesuvius Challenge awarded its $700,000 Grand Prize to Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger for reading the first complete passage from a carbonized Herculaneum scroll buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE. The team trained machine learning models on synchrotron computed tomography scans to detect ink density invisible to the naked eye, recovering approximately 2,000 letters of Greek text on the philosophy of pleasure attributed to Philodemus. The technique reads scrolls without physically unrolling them, opening the entire Herculaneum library of approximately 1,800 carbonized scrolls to non-destructive readability.