Featured in this episode of Tech News of the Week
Herculaneum is a town in Italy you may have never heard of. You’re probably well familiar with it’s lamer, more outgoing cousin Pompeii though. Same volcano, same disasters, same thing where the town was buried by ash for centuries.
Most everything paper-related was of course incinerated, but the ones that weren’t got completely carbonized and thus preserved- which is good. What else they are though, is completely carbonized, which is bad. These scrolls cannot really even be opened, and the ink is totally indiscernible against the background. Or so we thought.
Scientists have done a lot of work with scanning these scrolls with ever-more-precise electron microscopes, which has given us a detailed image of the scrolls. However they’re still illegible. The Vesuvius Challenge is a public challenge for anyone with the skills to try and build an algorithm to read them. This week saw the first few winners.
The algorithm found the words “purple dye” or “cloths of purple.” It’s not much, but it’s a start.. And it’s the first time that word has been read by human eyes in 2000 years. Pretty cool. Also, the winner got $40k for the effort. Which makes it a lot cooler.