Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, destroying Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands, and burying local treasures. The Herculaneum papyri, a collection of almost 1,800 bundles of scrolls carbonized by the high heat of the explosion, were discovered among the famously ossified remains.
According to MailOnline, scientists are offering $250,000 in prizes to those who could decipher a series of 2,000-year-old manuscripts from the charred scrolls that were too fragile to unfurl.
$250K Vesuvius Challenge
Hundreds of the surviving scrolls, discovered in 1752 but too brittle to read as demonstrated by early attempts, have now been scanned. However, despite the fact that scientists have almost unrolled them using x-rays, the ancient manuscripts remain illegible.
The team of researchers responsible for the challenge has already shown the scrolls to an artificial intelligence system to extract the letters and symbols from high-resolution X-rays.
The machine learning algorithm was trained to read the ink outside and in the hidden layers of the unscrolled rolls, revealing perhaps up to 80% of the entire collection. The Vesuvius Challenge was launched with the goal of attracting those who could read these letters and symbols.
As PC Mag reports, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Cue co-founder Daniel Gross are giving $250,000 in rewards to the first team to read an unopened Herculaneum scroll, in collaboration with University of Kentucky computer science professor Brent Seales.
The same materials are provided to all participants, including 3D X-ray scans of two unopened Herculaneum scrolls, scans and photos of three papyrus fragments, and "the current best tools and techniques" for visually unwrapping scrolls.
The winning team will be the first to interpret four paragraphs from two complete scrolls utilizing machine learning, computer vision, or machine-assisted techniques. They will also earn $150,000.
There is potential to earn Progress Prizes of up to $100,000 along the way as an extra motivation for contestants to solve subproblems and share their work, as well as attract new participants.
The developers, whose goal is to "create history," feel that an open competition "will speed progress and enable us to reach this goal in 2023," according to the challenge website.
Participants and "interested observers" are asked to join the Vesuvius Challenge Discord server and to follow @scrollprize on Twitter for updates.
Mount Vesuvian's Volcanic Eruption and Recent Activity
According to the American Museum of Natural History, Mount Vesuvius was shaken by a massive earthquake in the year AD 62. Earthquakes persisted for years as Vesuvius' magma chamber swelled.
Ultimately, in August of the year AD 79, the eruptions began in which Mount Vesuvius released fine-grained ash, then coarse white pumice, and finally, gray pumice showered down over Pompeii for 12 hours.
The eruption then altered, wherein explosions sent hot avalanches of rock, ash, and gases down the volcano's slope. These devastating ash flows buried Pompeii and the adjacent Herculaneum for two days. A large number of their 20,000 countrymen were slain. A million people now live within a mile of the volcano, which might erupt violently again.
Volcanic activity has continued in the area around Vesuvius for 300,000 years, with seven particularly explosive eruptions in the last 17,000 years. Vesuvius is a stratovolcano formed over time by the stacking of previous ash and lava eruptions. Eruptions occur in cycles of tens to hundreds of years of sporadic eruptions broken by periods of dormancy.
RELATED ARTICLE: Image of Mount Vesuvius Volcano on Europe's Mainland Peaking Through the Clouds Appears on NASA Earth Observatory Site
Check out more news and information on Mount Vesuvius in Science Times.
