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Life of a Classics student

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"In the 1750s, an Italian farmer digging a well stumbled upon a lavish villa in the ruins of Herculaneum. Inside was a sprawling library with hundreds of scrolls, untouched since Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 C.E. Some of them were still neatly tucked away on the shelves.

This staggering discovery was the only complete library from antiquity ever found. But when 18th-century scholars tried to unroll the charred papyrus, the scrolls crumbled to pieces. They became resigned to the fact that the text hidden inside wouldn’t be revealed during their lifetimes.

In recent years, however, researchers realized that they were living in the generation that would finally solve the puzzle. Using artificial intelligence, they’ve developed methods to peer inside the Herculaneum scrolls without damaging them, revealing short passages of ancient text.

This month, researchers announced a new breakthrough. While analyzing a scroll known as PHerc. 172, they determined its title: On Vices. Based on other works, they think the full title is On Vices and Their Opposite Virtues and in Whom They Are and About What.

“We are thrilled to share that the written title of this scroll has been recovered from deep inside its carbonized folds of papyrus,” the Vesuvius Challenge, which is leading efforts to decipher the scrolls, says in a statement. “This is the first time the title of a still-rolled Herculaneum scroll has ever been recovered noninvasively.”

On Vices was written by Philodemus, a Greek philosopher who lived in Herculaneum more than a century before Vesuvius’ eruption. Born around 110 B.C.E., Philodemus studied at a school in Athens founded several centuries earlier by the influential philosopher Epicurus, who believed in achieving happiness by pursuing certain specific forms of pleasure.

“This will be a great opportunity to learn more about Philodemus’ ethical views and to get a better view of the On Vices as a whole,” Michael McOsker, a papyrologist at University College London who is working with the Vesuvius Challenge, tells CNN’s Catherine Nicholls.

When it launched in 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge offered more than $1 million in prize money to citizen scientists around the world who could use A.I. to help decipher scans of the Herculaneum scrolls. 

Spearheaded by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, the team scanned several of the scrolls and uploaded the data for anyone to use. To earn the prize money, participants competed to be the first to reach a series of milestones.

Reading the papyrus involves solving several difficult problems. After the rolled-up scrolls are scanned, their many layers need to be separated out and flattened into two-dimensional segments. At that point, the carbon-based ink usually isn’t visible in the scans, so machine-learning models are necessary to identify the inked sections.

In late 2023, a computer science student revealed the first word on an unopened scroll: “porphyras,” an ancient Greek term for “purple.” Months later, participants worked out 2,000 characters of text, which discussed pleasures such as music and food.

But PHerc. 172 is different from these earlier scrolls. When researchers scanned it last summer, they realized that some of the ink was visible in the images. They aren’t sure why this scroll is so much more legible, though they hypothesize it’s because the ink contains a denser contaminant such as lead, according to the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, which houses the scroll.

In early May, the Vesuvius Challenge announced that contestants Marcel Roth and Micha Nowak, computer scientists at Germany’s University of Würzburg, would receive $60,000 for deciphering the title. Sean Johnson, a researcher with the Vesuvius Challenge, had independently identified the title around the same time.

Researchers are anticipating many more breakthroughs on the horizon. In the past three months alone, they’ve already scanned dozens of new scrolls.

“The pace is ramping up very quickly,” McOsker tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “All of the technological progress that’s been made on this has been in the last three to five years—and on the timescales of classicists, that’s unbelievable.”"

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