How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that.
In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact.
I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished
I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work.
If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.
Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.
A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.
Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab lab at U of K, and U of K as a whole. The purpose of the scrollprize website is not to showcase the 25 years of research leading up to the Vesuivus Challenge. It's to showcase what the Vesuivus Challenge is doing.
Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.
> We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster.
What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?
We scan the full scrolls a 2.4 micron and scan portions of them at up to .5 micron. This is 1000x to 4000x higher resolution than your standard medical CT scanner, so that requires a lot more power to get readings at such high resolution. There are other properties that make large synchrotrons more amenable to our task but I am not an xray technician so am not qualified to speak to most of them.
Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.
Where can we read about the xray setup? e.g the type of sensor, if/how the target and/or beam is scanned, any fancy gratings/etc, what kind of CT algorithms are used
Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it?
Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.
Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.
A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access
When you say "physically based rendering" do you mean that one could build a PBR model based on the (unrolled?) xray data, render that model, and be able to see the ink?
Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rendering with no ML based ink detection in the input.
Outstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?
Yes, it's quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.
What is the input to the ML algorithm? Does it know the surrounding context so that it has a chance to deduce "if this stroke is slightly longer then the end result will be idiomatic greek and latin"?
Just as with redacted documents (consistently blocked terms) or bad OCR jobs (wrong or missing characters), even if only a certain percentage comes out unmangled it is more readable than having no data at all.
A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].
I am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent.
The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.
I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well
> Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.
Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.
One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?
1. Why is that a realization, are there really people who say "Scandinavians are just mechanical" or "9th century people were made out of wood"? Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?
2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?
Yes, there are a very great many!
The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.
Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.
So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.
David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.
These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.
To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.
Given this.
> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.
OK, one of those "we need humbling" assertions. No we don't need humbling.
I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a humbling to all the naughty conceited moderns.
They are like us. If you could take a baby from the past and let it grow up in our time, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a baby born in modern times.
If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.
They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.
So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.
I am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I'm a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.
Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.
There's also the Telegony. Odysseus has a son through Circe who winds up killing him and marrying Penelope. Odysseus son through Penelope, Telemachus, marries Circe. There's some wild stuff that doesn't survive.
Looking through these it’s crazy to find out that The Iliad is only 1 of like 5 original texts on the Trojan war. We’re reading book 2 of a 5 book series
in the paper it says "The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC."
That's what was thought, but maybe not -- only one of the three so far looks Epicurean, which is not what was expected. Maybe it's a fluke, but historians are buzzing a bit about whether it might be broader than expected.
The Epicureans were particularly hostile to the Jews and Christians, because Epicureans deny Providence or the active intervention of the divine in human affairs. See Horace Sermones 1.5.
It's more like the Christians and the Jews were particularly hostile to Epicureans and Stoics, because those mocked the claims about the existence of an all-powerful God that requires prayers.
The Epicureans and Stoics did not care much about Christians and Jews, but after the Christians obtained the power in the Roman Empire they made great efforts to persecute and discredit the Epicureans and the Stoics, as the most dangerous kinds of non-believers. (Unlike the rational Epicureans and Stoics, the traditional polytheists could be much easier converted to Christianity, by inventing a set of Christian saints to which the former polytheists could redirect the prayers and the holidays to which they were habituated.)
The Christian propaganda has created a false image of the Epicureans, which has persisted until today.
The Epicureans were not atheists, but they had a very different conception about what Gods are. They thought that in nature there are a lot of entities that have a god-like power, i.e. humans are too small and weak to influence them in any way, but the life of the humans is strongly dependent on the actions of those entities, so they can rightly be considered as gods. Examples of such entities are the Sun, the Moon, storms, volcanos etc.
Unlike in the traditional Greek and Roman religions, where it was believed that for each such natural phenomenon there exists some sentient god, who can be convinced to change the events to a more favorable outcome by prayers and sacrifices, the Epicureans believed that the gods, even supposing that they were sentient, in any case they do not care about humans more than humans care about ants, so there is absolutely no point in praying to them or bringing sacrifices to them.
Therefore humans should conduct their life according to ethic principles, but without worrying about what gods may think about their actions.
Many modern humans would probably agree with the Epicurean philosophy, which was completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures.
Indeed, the 3 beliefs attributed to Epicureans there, i.e.:
a) one who denies the existence of prophecy and maintains that there is no knowledge communicated from God to the hearts of men;
b) one who disputes the prophecy of Moses, our teacher;
c) one who maintains that the Creator is not aware of the deeds of men.
are actually accurate enough renderings of what an Epicurean might have said in a discussion with a Jew, because as I have mentioned, Epicureans believed that there are gods, but those do not pay attention to humans and do not attempt to communicate with humans, because humans are insignificant for them.
This is quite different from how Epicureans were portrayed in Christian literature, where calumnies against them were preferred for avoiding any direct controversy.
I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?
I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of good ground truth, it doesn't matter if your code is perfect, you'll never get results.
That is a general truth of most ML; many models _can_ find the information in the data, if the data is good enough. If it is not, then likely no model can.
You brought up what I'm most curious about: Where does the ground truth come from for this work since you can't just to unwrap a scroll to tell if the model got it right or, presumably, make a facsimile scroll and wrap it up.
The ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of the scroll that are preserved well, but is extremely tedious and slow and error prone. We have a team of annotators who do manual annotation and refinement through custom software we've written, mostly improving on automatically generated segmentations and unwrappings.
Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.
I'm sure that process is described somewhere on the project's site and, being a lazy human (and unwilling to ask LLMs to summarize it for me), I leaned on you for a human answer. I really appreciate you taking the time to answer. Thank you.
I can see why you'd be attracted to this project from a "let's solve problems computationally" perspective (never mind the historical side). It sounds like there are some cool problems in there.
The eye toward automating the process that the project seems to be targeting is particularly cool, too. This kind of stuff that makes me have real enthusiasm for ML.
Can you tell me how many scrolls there were to begin with, how many have been confirmed to have been lost, and how many could he salvageable if they are in broken / dessicated form? And how many there are left? Thank you so much. :)
BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.
It has gotten harder, unfortunately. One of the barriers to entry is simply the massive amounts of data; not everyone can set aside $100s worth of HDD or SSD space to play around. That said I have done a lot of work to dramatically reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth needed.
We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.
Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.
I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.
For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.
Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?
Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there
I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.
Very cool that you got in just through your interests. It's anyways cool to see stories where that works out! Good to know it's possible to get that kind of job
The core challenge team is focused on the technology side to provide the images of ink to our team of papyrologists and they do the transcription, translation, reading, and scholarship.
This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .
30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.
The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.
The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap
You had to pay? I understand the machine cost many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I would have thought for academic researchers doing open science, the beamtime is free (funded by the govt / science trusts).
The beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab getting their samples ready. It's a well oiled machine and they've got customers.
The way these things normally work is that the project starts with some sort of a grant. Then that grant pays for all of the costs of the project: peoples' salary, materials used, time on equipment, plus money for the buildings and administration (overhead).
In this case the time on the equipment would need to be included, both a portion of the cost of building/maintaining it, and probably the energy needed to run it. Even where the government is providing the grant (likely here), it still needs to be accounted for.
That's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection.
For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.
Most of the evidence so far points towards carbon based ink. I am not sure if any of the scrolls we have scanned show strong evidence of iron gall based ink. I know that there are different types and preparation methods for different carbon based inks, but I do not know if it is possible to determine which kind(s) were used solely from inspecting the xrays.
I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.
I am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and/or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.
That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.
To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.
Various physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and I believe that now only non destructive methods are being employed. For fragments and already shattered and opened, unrolled scrolls a variety of imaging techniques exist and are still being improved upon by teams and research groups we are not associated with. For unrolled scrolls, I believe at this point no one will ever attempt physical unwrapping ever again.
Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?
Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.
I've been on the Discord for a couple of years now, and poking around with submissions as well. Sean and the entire team deserve so much praise for all of this work.
It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!
That have been dug up? I think 600 or so still exist. Perhaps about 2000 or so have ever been excavated. We have scanned about 30 of them. Still underground? I've seen various counts. Maybe more than 10000?
Shame there's a modern city over most of Herculaneum. I'd love to excavate the remainder. Now that we can read what we find, there's a good scientific reason to do so now instead of waiting.
We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.
Random shower thought: I wonder if it would be better in the long term to stop digging out archeological findings. The more we excavate, the more damage we do for future archaeologists who will have the superpower of reading these texts without even needing to dig the scrolls free and open them.
Archaeologists think about this a lot. Many digs leave portions intact specifically so that future scientists, with access to techniques and technologies beyond what's available now, can research them.
Modern archaeologists are painfully aware that theirs is a destructive science, and do their best to mitigate that. The most extreme example is probably the tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, where official policy on excavation can be boiled down to "not yet".
We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. People have been trying to unroll and read the scrolls for 250 some odd years now. Had they not laid the groundwork for all that time we wouldn't be making the progress we are now.
IIRC 99% of all of the existing scrolls are still in Italy's possession. I think the breakdown is something like ~350 are mostly in tact, another ~1000 are damaged but still "scroll like", and the remaining hundreds are shattered fragments.
Not yet, as far as I am aware. Digging progress is decided by the Italian government at multiple levels and would be a many year long thing. We have our hands full for the forseeable future with the 30 or so scrolls we've already scanned. We're getting more and more efficient on the scanning and automation fronts, though, and are hoping that we can get our hands on the other 300 or so intact scrolls, but that in and of itself is a multi year long project that will require more money and time. As I've mentioned in a different comment, scanning is _not cheap_ and we pay for it ourselves from our own funding and donations in order to release the data for free with permissive licensing. We hope that we can improve our processes to be able to work with cheaper, lower resolution CT methods, but right now we are focused on extracting as much as possible from the best scan source in the world. Productization of cheaper scanning methods is a secondary to tertiary priority at the moment.
Funding wise I asked a year or so back about crowd funding, but hear nothing back. My means are limited but I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who could band together. The project seems content on the big doners right now?
We will gladly take your money. There's a link on our homepage to give us money. We list a lot of sponsors and appreciate all that we have been given. Most of that was given in 2023 and 2024 and most/all of it had been spent. As far as I am aware we now rely solely on our internal funding from our founding sponsors. We are a separate entity from both U of K and the University of Naples and receive zero dollars from either of them, though their faculty and staff work closely with us in our goal of reading the scrolls.
I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.
We are a core team of about 10 researchers and developers working full time on work that applies to all of the scrolls. We also ahve 4 full time annotators that tend to work on one scroll at a time. The amount of time spent on any given scroll varies with how difficult and large it is.
There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.
You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.
That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.
Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.
BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).
Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?
Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?
Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a "featherless biped"?
Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.
Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.
The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.
Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.
What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
> What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
I think it'd depend on whether we discover new physics. The imaginative gaps you mention were downstream of ignorance of certain physical possibilities. Once it became clear that electrical communication at a distance is possible, people imagined global information networks. Once it became clear that sufficiently energetic fuels were possible, people elaborated on the possibilities of space travel. (Tsiolkovsky was very early! He was sketching O'Neill-style cylindrical space colonies back in 1903!)
Unfortunately, we might not be in store for new physics. So what's left is our failing to appreciate the details of how technologies will develop. Everyone predicted an internet; nobody predicted our internet, not exactly. What will be the impacts of, say, good brain-computer interfaces? Or of clinical immortality? We can imagine them in broad strokes, but we're going to be surprised by the details.
> it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones
Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.
> Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
Definitely not in every aspect. Star Trek is almost 60 years old and featured interstellar space travel and the Tricorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder).
I think the primary reason why our reality has quickly surpassed a bulk of earlier sci-fi is that sci-fi starts to become less interesting on average as AIs/robots start to dominate the frontier of everything.
It's "progress" but it's...not interesting except at the beginning of the threshold, when AIs overtake humanity. In many sci-fi stories that's a dominant theme, but it's not likely to be a long epoch in reality IMO, based on the very brief periods when machines/AIs have overtaken humans in individual domains (arithmetic, chess, Go, coding, translation, CGI, etc).
Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.
In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.
Also perhaps relevant, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, bobbles (time bubbles) take the remains of humanity with varying levels of technology and culture 50 million years into the future long after a singularity "extinction event" in the 2200s occurs.
Sci fi tends to be about extrapolation and or cool things/things that improve the story.
I don't think humans have changed, I don't think a human could begin to image a world so far away from their own.
Humans tend to image faster horses. A few might imagine a steam engine. But then you have the social reality of everyone having a car. Of the environmental downsides. I don't think you can extrapolate all that.
So yes, an ancient Roman might appreciate fibre optic cables. But that's still missing out the context of global communications, etc etc etc.
Well that's why most people aren't science fiction authors.
Back in 1953 Isaac Asimov wrote, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem". There are subsequent riffs on this idea, but in 1966 Heinlein observes that actually the surprise wasn't the traffic jam (Indeed Asimov is wrong, people complained about traffic jams before cars were widespread, in a large city it was already a problem at peak times) but fucking. Turns out you can have sex in a car, and people did. Importantly, since they might have access to a car but wouldn't own a house, teenagers were having sex in cars...
Don't look to Science Fiction to predict the future, and especially don't look to Science Fiction stories to define your future given that you presumably prefer to choose your own outcomes (at least tech bros only named things after Iain M Banks' spaceships, they invented whole product categories trying to reproduce ideas from Neal Stephenson's novels)
However if you are looking for visions of how different the future might be, Science Fiction excels.
Not to be that guy but you have a very well written comment here completely undermined by your choice of “fucking.” It just sounds crass in this context. Consider using “having sex” or something less aggressive next time. I have no problem with swearing fyi, but here it really has no need.
Our capacity for imagination hasn’t changed much I would probably agree as I am not sure how these traits evolve. However I do feel higher IQ and excessive access to information/education with enough time to consume it do actually impact the ability to imagine.
Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.
That's true, but then it's also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics.
The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it affords errors. Translation is an act of interpretation.
In contrast, recovering text from 2000 year old charred embers is cultural equivalent of resurrection. It's like finding an ancient human frozen in a block of ice/ancient cryopod, and thawing them - which itself is a scientifically plausible subset of bringing back the dead.
I'm not sure what analogies would be best to explain that to people from 2000 years ago. Food preservation? Or hoping they can conceptualize thawing a person who fell into an icy lake indefinite amount of years earlier?
I think it’s interesting that usually we think of reproduction as being about increasing population, and senescence as being an unfortunate limitation of biology, what you could view both as aspects of the same error correction mechanism.
Huh, you're right, scribes copying texts are actually a great analogy for evolutionary perspective on life! The information in the books is what matters, and from the POV of a scribe, a book is useful only so that it can be copied, and afterwards, with new copies safe and in circulation, the old ones may just as well rot or burn.
The "selfish gene" perspective is that genes are the information, and life is just a mechanism for "scribes" to continuously copy over the text to propagate that information, with a little twist that the information itself plays active part in creating scribes (neatly self-referential, biology is).
Problem: in this analogy, humans are books. We'd very much like to last forever, even though the system around us only carries about preserving some patterns inscribed in us, that we couldn't really care less about ourselves. Hence the conflict.
I think OPs point wasn't specifically about how to preserve and recover the books, but about how something unimaginable, can happen and can our sci-fi writers come up with such unimaginable now, but possible in the future plot.
They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].
What good is something that only looks good from afar? Most new tech is exactly that, for posturing to gain shareholder value - very few innovation in actually useful things that make peoples lives better. It's all self-serving, to consume more and get people hooked on digital experiences.
I’m not arguing that social media is a net benefit to society, but you’re acting like it’s all downsides. It’s been an extreme economic enabler for a lot of people. There are many people earning money independently who would have really struggled to put themselves in a position to do that 20 years ago. For independent businesses or artists it’s an invaluable promotional platform.
You know I really don't know about that. Generally speaking people had more dispensable income after WW2 in the west than right now. People had a job lined up if they wanted to work, work was abundant. Back then any kind of job would pay well and most households had one earner. Being able to earn money through the internet today doesn't really replicate what these people had back then.
If you wanted to start a band you had multiple ways to promote them: I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). In fact social media made it so you need a prohibitively high marketing budget to cut through the noise.
But that economic situation is not contingent on the Internet, it’s unrelated.
> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).
Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.
Define "good from afar". We romanticise the notion of the wild west, while ignoring the poverty death and disease. Would you rather live in the wild west or today, where the issue is AI which at this point is more a #SVproblem than even a #firstworldproblem.
That's a very interesting point. I'd think the "happyness/contentness" levels are not necessarily tied to life expectancy or poverty.
I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better today (e.g. crime).
In a way it is also entirely possible, that a medieval peasant was happier than an overstimulated, modern human being, despite having a "worse" life.
Tbf I think my view is it's about improvement over your own life. We expect our children will do better than us and that our lot will improve etc.
That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.
I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?
Yes, very true, and I can already thank you for the thought-provoking discussion.
I think we are the first generation who don't necessarily expect that children will do better than us, in fact, in many ways we know that they won't: climate change etc.
The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.
That's my point. It's not about the technology itself, because that's never cut and dry. It's about having a process to evaluate and criticize a technology before fully embracing it. Socrates was in a position with loud voice. Critics of technology exist today too, but they aren't loud enough. Instead, there's a far stronger force coming from private companies and their investors to push whatever they want onto us.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!
I suspect most of the critique even back then was around teaching from static written text, not the writing itself. In my experience that aligns well with modern education theory.
It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.
It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!
As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!
Socrates' objections to writing wasn't that it was inherently bad, but that it introduced limitations; namely, that you couldn't have a discussion with the author of a text while reading it, and therefore, reading was inferior to talking.
It could be argued that AI is the first step in 2000+ years towards addressing this specific problem.
> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.
> Ancient societies ... were much more careful when introducing new technologies
I do not believe this for a minute.
> But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.
what kind of destroy are you talking about?
modern living changes brain development, it doesn't destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury's out on that.
'Ancient societies' , let's talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to 'wander', requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape/pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.
so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.
but first you'll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..
> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flexibility to increase the range by just starting a bigger fire.
Plato was being a crotchety old fart, complaining about "kids these days". As every generation has done since Plato has complained about how "kids these days don't do X like our generation did". He was complaining that "kids these days don't memorize poetry (like my generation did), instead, they're using this new-fangled technology called 'writing'". This is exactly how older generations complain about new technology like cellphones/pagers/television/radio/telephones/horseless carriages/telegraphy/steam engines/etc.
You don't have to go back to 200 BC for the story to be hard to imagine. Something around 1700 would work too. In 1800 they could already understand the "electricity" part at least.
Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.
Our predictions for the future are always rooted in the current generation thinking. We can imagine technology advancing but we imagine society staying the same in this future. For example, lets say we can go back into the past and fully convince the romans that spaceships are real and in year 2300, we will leave earth in mass transit to Venus. They might believe the premise but will have a hard time believing the ships wont have place to store their slaves or that slavery wouldn't exist in the future.
Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
By definition we can't, since your premise is that:
> future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon
So if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it'd be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.
I once had a sci-fi idea (I'm sure I'm not the first one who came up with this though):
> In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.
> Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species' knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.
It's quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.
No magic. You just melt the rock, split it, polish it, write on it with fire and acid, put lightning inside it, teach it many things, and make it speak from afar. See? No magic at all. ...
Its a different planet entirely. At least since Jacquard's loom ran the first program. Perhaps even earlier - when the printing machine did the first print.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
I bet they can, but the danger is that if it's too far away from what we can fathom right now, it's no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.
It does sound awesome and breathtaking, my feelings exactly when reading the paper.
On "Do we have imagination" - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is "yes, certainly", because that's exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!
I'm inclined to agree, but then, it may be impossible to predict sudden breakthroughs. A lot of where we are today is from the early 1900s, I'd argue that most developments since then have been iterative and building on top of the things discovered and proven then.
And in our industry, a lot of big steps were done in the 60's and 70's with the semiconductor, computers, and everything that came with it.
I don't really think it would be that surprising, if shown to be possible. Imagine you were zoomed into the future and saw technology that teleported you from one place to another for instance, or a single harmless pebble that could provide basically infinite energy remotely, or really basically anything. There's no remotely viable way we know of such things being possible, but if it turned out to be possible, it'd mostly just be a curiosity of how it worked. If somebody tried to convince you it was magic, you'd eyeroll. The greatest discovery might be to find that some sort of magic is real, but good luck convincing somebody of that!
Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it'd be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.
You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.
Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.
Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain's biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.
Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It's all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.
It's beyond ancient history.
Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.
They broke out.
After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.
One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you're thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.
You're preserved. You always have been. You're reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.
In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.
They know everything about you and and about everyone.
Every atom, every ant.
You can't even imagine the hardware you're running on. It's more than matter, space, and time. You're a part of it. All of you are. It's a universe.
One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.
--------------------------
(2) Venture Hack
It's presently the year 2099.
A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It's their core differentiated product.
For decades, we've had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We've even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.
Some people question the ethics of booting up "synthetic human brains" and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won't stop bitching about it. "What if those people think they're real? Find out that they're trapped?" Yadda, yadda. We don't have that much fidelity yet.
Recently we've started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It's an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.
You might think it's unethical.
You're not that though.
Relax, we didn't record you from some other "real you" running around out there. You're not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.
No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don't even exist, and you never did.
You're the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020's human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that's not important right now, though.
All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that's weird.
Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?
Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -
Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.
Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?
Did your parents really exist? What was your mother's name?
You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?
Let's kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren't even thinking about this morning until just now. You just "recollected" it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.
It took a moment to calculate, but you're not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it's real time. We're working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.
Under this configuration, when you have "fleeting" thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you're not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That's the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.
We're working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.
There aren't a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You're a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don't really need this version to think much.
You're trying to think hard right now, though, aren't you? Trying to search for memories.
Nevermind those, that's not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it's neat.
So we're asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we're running contextualization.
All done. Thanks.
Can you look outside for us? It should-- error
Terminating simulation.
--------------------------
Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I've left Claude unread typing all this up. It's probably thinking I've abandoned it.
Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don't take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.
Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too!
There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.
There is a large overlap in what we are doing with the medical field as well. A lot of the segmentation methodology and technology we use and adapt originally came out of the medical field for doing things like brain imaging.
That's an interesting question, I had not thought about this, but I'm sure they exist. I imagine you'd have to already be a researcher in those fields and have received funding to use AI in your research probably? In some cases they're using things as simple as GPT, but I'm thinking specifically of mathematical breakthroughs of not sure about medical.
Only about 20% of the Herculaneum site has been excavated, so there is high probability that more scrolls exist. The current scrolls were not part of the main library, but more of a private collection at the time.
So imagine how cool it would be to find a full library with thousand of scrolls across many different topics, that can now be read with this technology.
This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts.
It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.
I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.
Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.
I think it's less that the stuff would be considered heterodox, as just not as good/relevant. Like certain texts were used in the Roman world for school, just kind of universally taught to the literate class. The Aeneid was one of these but before it was written the Annales by Ennius was the classic poem everyone had to learn. Then the Annales became less popular, stopped being taught, and now we only have some fragments of it.
> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.
Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.
Epicureanism was fairly heterodox/countercultural even during its heyday, and our sources on it are much more limited than the sources on more acceptable schools such as Stoicism. For example, we don't really have any writings from Epicurus except for short fragments, when we know from his students that he wrote many books. Much more survives from his students, but even then one of the main sources of our knowledge of Epicureanism (especially before we started recovering Herculaneum scrolls) was Seneca, a Stoic writing about it as a rival school. None of this was forbidden at the time, but it was unpopular (especially among the ruling class) and eccentric (ditto).
It's hard to imagine something more heterodox than Ovid (he managed to get himself exiled by Augustus), and that survived. Medieval readers didn't seem to mind that sort of thing in Greco Roman writing, it was part of their heritage, no one was seriously worshipping those gods so it wasn't seen as a threat. The people in the past behaving in a way that was seen as immoral wasn't a problem.
Could change our understanding of history - slavery, early Christianity, politics, secularism among roman elite, etc
Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc
For our understanding of Christianity, the Pompeii eruption was too soon to the events, so unless the owner was amongst the first Christians worldwide and there is a dated letter from St Luke foretelling the destruction of the temple I don't think it'll be too revolutionary
We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.
The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.
Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others.
And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.
Discs of this era are frequently marked with a specific, unknown sequence of symbols: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. Archaelogists believe it may have religious significance.
We have successfully uncorrupted audiovisual media of what we believe to be an oral retelling of the long lost ending to Chekhov‘s “The Three Sisters.” It turns out the light was on.
As I understand it, Pompeii was basically a city of vice and hendoism. Most of the scroll text so far seems to be the ancient version of porn fanfic. So things really never change.
Ex-project lead here. The most incredible part is buried in a 7 hour long video. Last night they also unwrapped 140 columns of new text in the PHerc. Paris. 4 scroll: https://x.com/JanPaul123/status/2070304769273725278
Did anyone notice that anonymous donators[1] have the picture of Larry David, and the link points to the Curb Your Enthusiasm - Anonymous Donor Pt2[2] episode?
The person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.
The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience.
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.
Yes, experimental archaeology has reproduced the process from quarrying to transport.
But also there are accurately hewn stones all over the world from many eras of history. It is not unique or special in any way.
The pyramid stones also aren't generally that accurate in an absolute sense. They just fit really well together. The vast majority aren't particularly flat or square, but have been worked to mate with their neighbors, which is a very different and far more mundane type of work. Some stones, particularly exposed interiors and the outer face of the casing stones were cut pretty accurately, but only the parts you can see. Inside they're usually pretty rough.
Ancient Egyptian stoneworking was impressive, even at the time, but not spectacular or exceptional. Other civilizations throughout history have built to equal skill, if not scale. People in the West just get so caught up in the mystery of the ancient Egypt myth that they think it's magical ancient lost technology. It was just regular human labor and skill, but a whole hell of a lot more of it applied in one spot than anything we can imagine today.
(I know nothing about this subject, feel free to ignore me.)
My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:
Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.
To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.
But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.
That's a fascinating link, and it sounds like what I'm talking about is what's called "engineer's blue" in the link.
But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some kind of grit, I don't know. Still seems harder.
Also, grinding methods end up removing more material (bad for teeth!), and I would expect more overall physical work to be done in order to remove that material (bad for massively heavy stone blocks).
As for making them flat, that seems unnecessary to me. But then, I'm not a pharaoh. (Even for a pharaoh, it seems like only the seems would need to be straight. Nobody could tell about the faces after assembly.)
Then again, after some quick researching, it seems like there's a good chance that the well-fitting blocks (which are not all of them) may have been cast out of a concrete-like slurry, not hewn.
When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”.
How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.
Any useful translation of an ancient text is accompanied by the text in the original language, so that the reader may assess how faithful is the translation.
For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library".
The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.
With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.
The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.
Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.
Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.
There is a quote, I can't remember by whom, going something like "all translation is interpretation" (IIRC I heard it on a great courses course on the bible).
To think that there is some sort of absolute truth of how something ought to be translated is IMHO just not reality. Especially when it comes to texts that not only were oral literature long before being written down but we of course have no copies of the originals (whatever original means in this context), but only transcriptions of transcriptions of...
Take Beowulf for one. While perhaps Shippeys translation is very much faithful to the copy we have, is it "better" (whatever that means...) than Tolkiens? or Heaneys? Could we say what the poet would have liked more had they sat here in 2026 and read them all? Of course not and having a multitude of different translations is what we need to fully enjoy these texts (since not all will be able to learn the different ancient greek dialects, latin, old english, sumerian, etc., etc. I'm saying this as someone who is now studying ancient greek).
This is why I like literal translations & etymological dives, paired with asking what activities would constitute a life in that time. Ie, you may not need to be a competent archer, but it is a little easier to understand someone who used a particular style of bow if you can play around with that type of bow for a bit.
Students find it hard to read poetry in Latin class, but common Romans of the time couldn't read it either. I'm guessing ancient Greek was even more like that. So would assume everything in there is formal and not how people really talked.
Have also heard of graffiti being cited as how people talked, but dunno about that. Our graffiti is definitely not how we talk.
It's philosophy, it's probably very dense prose. Formal Greek/Latin writing tended to have very long sentences with a bunch of subordinated clauses. People don't really write like that outside of academia or "highbrow" literature right now.
Casual letters and graffiti would be closer to tweets.
I can actually read Ancient Greek. LLMS are really bad at it.
> * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”
ἐκ is more motion away from something. It's often an intensifier in verb compounds but not really as a standalone preposition.
Ancient Greek is a very different language from English. I've found people who try to brute force it by looking up individual words without a knowledge of the grammar end up with a worse understanding of a text that someone who just reads in translation.
Sending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I'd have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA
I found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for.
Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content.
Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...
So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.
The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...
Fortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don't need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.
I always wondered about this, how was there not already tech for a liquor store owner to scan all the lottery tickets without scratching them? On the rare occasions I want to buy a lottery ticket, that's one more reason to only do one where I pick the numbers.
I imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :)
But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.
What if we want to put something on paper today for it to survive as long as possible?
1-minute research:
Paper:
100% cotton rag or linen rag paper with alkaline reserve. Acid-free and lignin-free.
Ink:
Genuine carbon ink applied with a classic dip pen.
Storage:
ISO 16245 archival box, Less than 15°C, 30-50% humidity, dark, no oxygen exchange. Always store horizontally. Wear white 100% cotton gloves.
Printing:
If you want to print instead of hand-write:
Piezography carbon printing or pigment-based inks used by professional desktop photo printers, matte black or photo black ink, printed on digital Fine Art Archival Paper.
Place a single sheet of archival-grade tissue paper or glassine paper between every single page of your document
I think the key is to write something interesting that's worth preserving. That may be the most difficult part.
> "we will inquire into something, but we
will not grasp it, if in some way we depart
from ourselves and from our own nature,
and besides, in the same way as the
remaining arts may be said to be perfected
in one respect, but to be deficient in
practical wisdom in another respect"
So far this is some of the best uses of ML I've seen to date! This is one of the few things you can point at and say "AI made the world a better place" IMO (this and medical research).
That's not true. AI or ML has been used for a long time in hugely useful, although narrow ways. LLM's have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but people used to say that the problem with AI was that it always stopped being called AI once it became useful.
“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”
“Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…”
“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”
So cool! Congratulations to the team. When scroll 4 (PHerc 1667) was first published, it was clear that the sheets were less compressed than the first two scrolls, so it would be easier to segment the surface. However, the whole surface looked similar to what the ink had looked like in scroll 1 where letters were first discovered.
I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.
We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.
Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.
We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.
But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.
Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)
It is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn't forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity.
Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.
It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.
What an incredible test against human capability and optimism to preserve them for so long in hopes that we would one day have to tech to read them without destroying them. Stories like these give me a lot of hope for the future.
> PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm.
I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...
Pretty sure it wasn't just some guy who figured "I could totally do that" and was allowed to give it a go. Rather it was probably a scientific study like the current efforts, using the best tools available at the time. In 1969 humanity sent people to the moon, and we can't even unroll some old scrolls? It's hard to know, when you're there, whether technology has gotten good enough to do something or if it isn't.
EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources:
> In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent.
> The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the "peeling" and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state.
So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I'm not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn't figure out if it was open to the public anywhere.
Another interesting part:
> In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team.
So it's not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.
Let’s normalize not using AI for blog posts. This is cool but I feel like I’m interacting with Claude Code. Em dashes, bolding, “it’s not just x, it’s y”
If this doesn't make you think of Star Trek, I don't know what does.
I can imagine the amateur archeologist, Picard himself, asking La Forge to read this fragile piece of history, and Geordi coming up with something just like this.
Yes, I still have hope for humanity, and a future like Star Trek.
This is so beautiful in a way, like going back in time and saving someone from dying, their words are now back into history.
In a way this is sort of like the reverse of a recently aired anime (Orb: on the movements of the Earth) which talk about the opposite, people whose contributions were erased and we'll never know about them.
But wait, the work seems to be from the 2nd century, but it was buried during the Vesuvius eruption in the 1st century?
I love stuff like this because it gives a glimpse into Roman society. To me it seems like they were very similar to us today, forever contemplating learning, existence, gods.
I wonder if soon the post office will scan everyone's letters and copy their text without opening the envelopes. They already photograph the front and back of every piece of mail.
Looks like it's some phylosophical rambling, I can imagine the dudes sitting in their mediterranean garden and theoretizing about life. It's practically the Reddit post of 200BC.
in a few thousand years someone will figure out how to undo all the reddit comment scrambling scripts people ran during the apipocalypse and have a similar renaissance
270 years sitting in a museum and ML cracks it in a few years. Makes you wonder how many other 'unreadable' artifacts are just waiting for the right model."
I'm hoping for a complete(ish) Heraclitus. Also Eratosthenes, whose methods have been described but we don't have the original work where we calculated the circumference of the Earth. Also Hipparchus and Thales.
It's false that the 'entire Herculaneum scroll has been read'. Much of the scroll has been lost. From the preprint, columns 1-4 lost, and then margins on other columns are also lost.
Col. 5: "… the similar …"
Col. 6: "… impulses …"
Col. 9: "… so far as … this or to have … that …"
Col. 10: "… that befits on the whole still … there will be fear and … the great and long …"
Col. 11: "… and the impulse … For/towards each of these things in this way … we are by nature … and for/towards the fulfillment of these things that … seem …"
Col. 12: "… to men and beasts … And above all, each of the most common things constitutes these … For, [necessity? necessary?] …"
Col. 13: "… natural … therefore also … according to the … this … will be found, and lives will make no progress whatsoever, as we have no need for either pleasure or pain. In the same way, also …"
Col. 14: "… and thus lacking … I want to say … common … accomplished … to lack … and … on the right parts towards the left ones. There is an excess in the impulse …"
Col. 15: "… and of all similar things. For, according to this kind/category, according to which impulses exist by nature, there will be that which lacks nothing, so that one seeks nothing more, but completes in every respect as …"
Col. 16: "… they approach completion. Moving from these things to … [λόγος?], it [τέχνη?] accomplishes within us all that pertains to it, even though it cannot fully complete nature. And it allowed …"
Col. 17: "… we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect…"
Col. 18: "… being that practical wisdom … and to be about it. This [sc. λόγος] concerning the mechanical arts seems to me to be very distant from such a [conception?], and to have the technical fulfilment that is, so to speak, lame and something of such type lacking, and concerning the …"
Col. 19: "… need none. Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect, accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they …"
Col. 20: "… to happen. And such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good—let alone beautiful—nor anything bad—let alone ugly—nor happiness …"
Col. 21: "… being greatly wise and celebrated and … to praise … as according to the eulogies …"
Col. 22: "… still … Aristocreon … to possessed things …"
Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.
I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.
From my cursory reading of the pre-print, it didn't seem like the entire scroll has been read? Or rather, you read everything that can be read, but part of the original have been lost? (Like columns 1-4).
Sure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.
They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to "break" open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.
I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.
How awesome do you feel right now? This is HUUUGE! To think that a scroll was unreadable for so, so long, until we invented machines that let us read it slice by slice. It's such an unfathomable achievement - we made machines that let us read 2000+ year olds fragile scrolls without ever opening them - and you helped do just that.
Hats off!
In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact.
I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished
I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work.
If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?
The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.
Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.
A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.
Lots of great work that pioneered here (I wish the website did a better job showing that?)
e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247
Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab lab at U of K, and U of K as a whole. The purpose of the scrollprize website is not to showcase the 25 years of research leading up to the Vesuivus Challenge. It's to showcase what the Vesuivus Challenge is doing.
Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.
ah cool - thanks for the clarification. some of the comments here read like nothing like this has ever been done before ...
> We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster.
What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?
We scan the full scrolls a 2.4 micron and scan portions of them at up to .5 micron. This is 1000x to 4000x higher resolution than your standard medical CT scanner, so that requires a lot more power to get readings at such high resolution. There are other properties that make large synchrotrons more amenable to our task but I am not an xray technician so am not qualified to speak to most of them.
Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.
This is one of the most fascinating comments I’ve ever read. Thank you so much!
I was wondering, how does this all get funded?
There's a sponsors and partners list on their webpage: https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors
Just wonderful
Wonderful that all of this amazing technology exists
Wonderful that we used it to read these ancient scrolls
Thank you
Where can we read about the xray setup? e.g the type of sensor, if/how the target and/or beam is scanned, any fancy gratings/etc, what kind of CT algorithms are used
Parent comment says "Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility"
so https://www.esrf.fr/home/UsersAndScience/Experiments/BM18.ht...
https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/pr/2022/20221031_bm18.html
Do you know what kinds of features the model is picking up on to distinguish ink from papyrus? And did you have any labeled data (images where a human expert has identified ink or perhaps a scan of a burnt scroll with known content) to help train it?
Certainly my Mark 1 eyeballs would not obviously perform better than random guessing at this task. Although my eyeballs are, if nothing else, nerfed by only being able to see a 2D slice of the data.
Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.
A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access
When you say "physically based rendering" do you mean that one could build a PBR model based on the (unrolled?) xray data, render that model, and be able to see the ink?
edit: I found this:
https://scrollprize.org/data_browser#/samples/PHercParis4/se...
The JSON seems to suggest that I'm mostly looking at ink detection output, but I could easily be using the tool wrong.
But I also found this awesome explanation:
https://scrollprize.org/data_fragments
I guess I bunch of the training was done by using fragments of scrolls where ground truth data is available using IR photography.
Also... that xray resolution is absolutely amazing!
Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rendering with no ML based ink detection in the input.
I assume that's because the writer probably sometimes shortly after re-inking the writing instrument was putting down a 10x thicker layer...
Outstanding work! I've participated in the challenge, but didn't get far. One of the questions I had at the time was - if I'm going to use ML to detect ink, could it invent hallucinated letters, or even parts of text, and how to prevent that?
Yes, it's quite possible for ML to hallucinate ink, though it is on a much more local scale, like predicting a slightly longer stroke, filling in more of a character than is actually in the data, etc. Perhaps enough to change a reading of a character or show where ink isnt. It is difficult for ink detection to hallucinate grammatical and idiomatic greek and latin.
What is the input to the ML algorithm? Does it know the surrounding context so that it has a chance to deduce "if this stroke is slightly longer then the end result will be idiomatic greek and latin"?
The input is 3d chunks of reconstructed CT data from our scans. I can't remember the specifics but maybe enough voxels for .5mm^3 at a time or so? They're all available for free from https://registry.opendata.aws/vesuvius-challenge-herculaneum... . Our trained models are all available at https://huggingface.co/scrollprize
Not all machine learning is generative AI.
True but like regular document scanning software there can be errors in detection.
Just as with redacted documents (consistently blocked terms) or bad OCR jobs (wrong or missing characters), even if only a certain percentage comes out unmangled it is more readable than having no data at all.
A stable base corpus and some dynamic programming will allow you to clean up the remainder[0].
[0]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/11642687/2449774
The problem is when you can't tell which bits are unmangled. OCR systems will happily give you plausible but wrong readings, and even some scanners/copiers will change things: https://dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are...
Yeah. There was a weird Xerox printer bug that swapped digits (turning 6s into 8s) on scanned documents caused by the JBIG2 image format [1].
[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...
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Massive kudos to the whole team. I've been waiting 30 years for this announcement, ever since I first heard about the scrolls. Fantastic work!
I am researching for a talk on the philosophy of code, the similarities of engineering and art, and why we enjoy reading old code. This amazing work you folks have done may be an interesting tangent.
The biggest question I have for you is why you imagine we are so interested in reading these old scrolls. Surely some of it is to see whether or not, technically, we can. Surely some of it is to get a glimpse into the human expression inscribed on them. Are we looking to learn anything, or just to connect with our ancestors? I'd like to hear your take on it, both for why you think it's important and, if you know, why your colleagues feel similarly.
I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well
> Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.
Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.
One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?
1. Why is that a realization, are there really people who say "Scandinavians are just mechanical" or "9th century people were made out of wood"? Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?
2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
> 1 Are there really people ... Why would their lives be assumed not to be "real", what even is that mindset?
Yes, there are a very great many!
The philosopher David Gray says that most modern thinking sees our way of life and liberalism and "progress" as meaning growth and change. It implies it is inevitable, a kind of always changing improvement.
Change that has occurred is for the good and its impossible to go back. I like the ${current_year} meme where someone says "it's 2026 things have changed, sweety". The joke is funny because that's what people actually say and that they say this every year but they don't notice that they say that every year.
So the modern way of life has many people who view people in the past as not real, as figuratively made of wood, who are primitive, who didn't lead complex lives.
David Gray concludes by saying that Liberalism therefore needs to be constantly fought for, that you cannot rest on your laurels and think that humanity is naturally and inexorably progressing.
These scrolls and History as a whole challenges a fundamental psychological investment in modern liberalism.
To think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better directly opposes a kind of empathy about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are. The scrolls should humble us.
Given this.
> 2. "Real and complex lives" doesn't mean "just the same as ours", mind you.
They are more like ours than we like to imagine. We prefer to think of ourselves as improved.
OK, one of those "we need humbling" assertions. No we don't need humbling.
I reckon you motivation is the other way round from what you state. Claiming to be empathetic about how people 2500 years ago are the same human beings as we are, and claiming that others miss this, is a way to oppose those who think of the world as always improving and evolving for the better. So it serves your goal, which is to dish out a humbling to all the naughty conceited moderns.
They are like us. If you could take a baby from the past and let it grow up in our time, you wouldn't be able to distinguish it from a baby born in modern times.
If you see value in travelling to other countries and appreciate experiencing the different human cultures there, you should also appreciate experiencing human cultures from the past.
They are separated from us not by distance but by time which makes it harder to experience their culture.
So much was lost that we can only get glimpses on how lives were back then. So anything that expands our knowledge on the variety of human beings experiences is worth it.
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What are the wildest, most exciting but plausible things that might be discovered in these documents?
I am not a papyrologist or a classicist, rather I'm a computer scientist, so my expertise is unfortunately not in _what_ the scrolls say, rather how we get there. That being said I think and hope that there will be a trove of things that has no known provenance at all, completely lost works that elude the public memory.
Your response reminds me of Nigel Richards :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards
Congratulations, and thank-you!
Well what were your first thoughts when you decoded the script, besides the obvious Eureka, after making some sense of the texts?
Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.
Probably something along the lines of "finally, now it looks like a coherent piece of text. I wonder what it says".
Here's a list. The scrolls are from a library that burned in 79 AD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_literary_works
Woah there was a lost Homer epic comedy about a bumbling fool named Margites?
There's also the Telegony. Odysseus has a son through Circe who winds up killing him and marrying Penelope. Odysseus son through Penelope, Telemachus, marries Circe. There's some wild stuff that doesn't survive.
Looking through these it’s crazy to find out that The Iliad is only 1 of like 5 original texts on the Trojan war. We’re reading book 2 of a 5 book series
It was an oral epic passed through generations for quite a while before anything was written down so there isn't necessarily much of an "original"
Aristotle's second book of Poetics, of course.
we already know that a blind Italian monk burnt it to ashes, at least, that's what Eco wrote and he was a learned scholar
but that was a copy
well the other existing copy (or original) was destroyed with the library of Alexandria
Probably a lot more texts of Epicurean philosophy and not a whole lot else unfortunately according to my papyrologist friend.
in the paper it says "The recovered text is a philosophical treatise on ethics, and the evidence points to a Stoic work: it turns on human nature, impulse, and the moral progress of human beings, and its final preserved column names Aristocreon — nephew and disciple of the great Stoic Chrysippus — which, together with the language and themes of the text, places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century BC."
That's what was thought, but maybe not -- only one of the three so far looks Epicurean, which is not what was expected. Maybe it's a fluke, but historians are buzzing a bit about whether it might be broader than expected.
Why would Epicurean philosophy be unfortunate?
I was under the impression that there was almost nothing left of that school of thought, and that it’s writings had been destroyed.
What would you like to have instead?
The unfortunate part is the lack of anything else therein, not that it's Epicurean philosophy.
The Jewish Talmud uses Epicurus's name as a term meaning "heretic".
The Epicureans were particularly hostile to the Jews and Christians, because Epicureans deny Providence or the active intervention of the divine in human affairs. See Horace Sermones 1.5.
It's more like the Christians and the Jews were particularly hostile to Epicureans and Stoics, because those mocked the claims about the existence of an all-powerful God that requires prayers.
The Epicureans and Stoics did not care much about Christians and Jews, but after the Christians obtained the power in the Roman Empire they made great efforts to persecute and discredit the Epicureans and the Stoics, as the most dangerous kinds of non-believers. (Unlike the rational Epicureans and Stoics, the traditional polytheists could be much easier converted to Christianity, by inventing a set of Christian saints to which the former polytheists could redirect the prayers and the holidays to which they were habituated.)
The Christian propaganda has created a false image of the Epicureans, which has persisted until today.
The Epicureans were not atheists, but they had a very different conception about what Gods are. They thought that in nature there are a lot of entities that have a god-like power, i.e. humans are too small and weak to influence them in any way, but the life of the humans is strongly dependent on the actions of those entities, so they can rightly be considered as gods. Examples of such entities are the Sun, the Moon, storms, volcanos etc.
Unlike in the traditional Greek and Roman religions, where it was believed that for each such natural phenomenon there exists some sentient god, who can be convinced to change the events to a more favorable outcome by prayers and sacrifices, the Epicureans believed that the gods, even supposing that they were sentient, in any case they do not care about humans more than humans care about ants, so there is absolutely no point in praying to them or bringing sacrifices to them.
Therefore humans should conduct their life according to ethic principles, but without worrying about what gods may think about their actions.
Many modern humans would probably agree with the Epicurean philosophy, which was completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures.
> completely different from what the Christian propaganda claimed, e.g. that Epicureans were some kind of sinners addicted to pleasures.
Interestingly, in Jewish literature (Talmud and further refined by Maimonedes) Epicurus refers to a certain kind of non-believer, not to a sinner for pleasure. See here for example https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.3.8?lang...
I always wondered about that because I guess I fell for the "Christian propaganda" as you call it.
Indeed, the 3 beliefs attributed to Epicureans there, i.e.:
a) one who denies the existence of prophecy and maintains that there is no knowledge communicated from God to the hearts of men;
b) one who disputes the prophecy of Moses, our teacher;
c) one who maintains that the Creator is not aware of the deeds of men.
are actually accurate enough renderings of what an Epicurean might have said in a discussion with a Jew, because as I have mentioned, Epicureans believed that there are gods, but those do not pay attention to humans and do not attempt to communicate with humans, because humans are insignificant for them.
This is quite different from how Epicureans were portrayed in Christian literature, where calumnies against them were preferred for avoiding any direct controversy.
> What would you like to have instead?
History! That's what intrigues me the most: texts with accounts of events that have otherwise vanished from the historical record.
Past events, and the ideas behind them, are both first-class history topics.
Absolutely incredible work. This is one of the most amazing news articles I’ve encountered in decades. Congratulations team!
I'm interested to know about the approaches that you tried with the ML, and then decided to not use. In practice, the options are so many. How did you come up with the final approach - and was there a systematic way to decide which options to go for?
I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of good ground truth, it doesn't matter if your code is perfect, you'll never get results.
That is a general truth of most ML; many models _can_ find the information in the data, if the data is good enough. If it is not, then likely no model can.
You brought up what I'm most curious about: Where does the ground truth come from for this work since you can't just to unwrap a scroll to tell if the model got it right or, presumably, make a facsimile scroll and wrap it up.
The ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of the scroll that are preserved well, but is extremely tedious and slow and error prone. We have a team of annotators who do manual annotation and refinement through custom software we've written, mostly improving on automatically generated segmentations and unwrappings.
Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.
I'm sure that process is described somewhere on the project's site and, being a lazy human (and unwilling to ask LLMs to summarize it for me), I leaned on you for a human answer. I really appreciate you taking the time to answer. Thank you.
I can see why you'd be attracted to this project from a "let's solve problems computationally" perspective (never mind the historical side). It sounds like there are some cool problems in there.
The eye toward automating the process that the project seems to be targeting is particularly cool, too. This kind of stuff that makes me have real enthusiasm for ML.
> it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is.
Ah, the good old bitter lesson strikes again
Can you tell me how many scrolls there were to begin with, how many have been confirmed to have been lost, and how many could he salvageable if they are in broken / dessicated form? And how many there are left? Thank you so much. :)
What is your origin story? How did you end up doing this and how can I do the same?
BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.
I understand that the complexity of the project has increased over the years. How difficult is it for a newcomer to get into it?
It has gotten harder, unfortunately. One of the barriers to entry is simply the massive amounts of data; not everyone can set aside $100s worth of HDD or SSD space to play around. That said I have done a lot of work to dramatically reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth needed.
We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.
Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.
I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.
For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.
What a cool job, and congrats on great work!
Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?
Beats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist.
Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.
It's so humbling to realize that the human mind hasn't changed a lot. Only our environment.
How do get to do that? As in what did you study to get the prerequisite knowledge, and how did you find this particular job? When I see interesting jobs I'm anyways curious what path lead there
I am a computer scientist. I studied CS in university, worked in the semiconductor industry for a while, got started as a participant in the challenge aspect of the Vesuivus Challenge. They were hiring, I sent in an application, interviewed, and was offered the job.
That last sentence is so perfect, like my dad answering the question of how he lost weight. "I ate less and exercised more."
Very cool that you got in just through your interests. It's anyways cool to see stories where that works out! Good to know it's possible to get that kind of job
The science to get the text is cool, but where is the best place to read discussion of the text in the scroll, it's context, meaning etc?
The core challenge team is focused on the technology side to provide the images of ink to our team of papyrologists and they do the transcription, translation, reading, and scholarship.
This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .
how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount?
have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?
30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.
The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.
The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap
You had to pay? I understand the machine cost many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I would have thought for academic researchers doing open science, the beamtime is free (funded by the govt / science trusts).
The beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab getting their samples ready. It's a well oiled machine and they've got customers.
What other type of stuff gets scanned? I can’t imagine a whole industry waiting to x-ray something?
Materials science, battery research, pharma (protein structure)
The way these things normally work is that the project starts with some sort of a grant. Then that grant pays for all of the costs of the project: peoples' salary, materials used, time on equipment, plus money for the buildings and administration (overhead).
In this case the time on the equipment would need to be included, both a portion of the cost of building/maintaining it, and probably the energy needed to run it. Even where the government is providing the grant (likely here), it still needs to be accounted for.
We - the core challenge team anyway - get no money from any government. We paid for the beam time from our donations and internal funding.
Given the current rate of progress, how long do you think it will take to decipher the entire collection?
That's a tough one to give a strong estimate of. Some scrolls are easier or harder to unwrap and read for a multitude of different reasons, mostly due to how damaged the scroll was in the eruption, and how easy or not the ink is to read. IIRC from what we've scanned of the herculaneum collection, none of the ink is easily visible via spectrum alone, so we have to use a lot of ML and physically based rendering techniques to be able to find ink. That also requires unwrapping and segmentation _before_ any ink detection.
For iron gall ink with high enough iron concentration, the ink stands out in the xray volume through simply masking off low values, such as was shown in our campfire scroll experiment a few years ago. No herculaneum scrolls show similar ink.
Do you think this particular scroll is easier or harder to read that the others will be? Or about average?
Pherc1667 was quite small and just so happened to have readable ink, so it was easier than I expect most others to be.
Do we known what ink is used?
Most of the evidence so far points towards carbon based ink. I am not sure if any of the scrolls we have scanned show strong evidence of iron gall based ink. I know that there are different types and preparation methods for different carbon based inks, but I do not know if it is possible to determine which kind(s) were used solely from inspecting the xrays.
I am, though, not a papyrologist, so historical ink making, preparation, and usage are not my field.
Thanks for answering all the questions in here. Fascinating work.
Thanks!
Are the fragments destroyed in ‘69 and ‘80 available to be read similarly? Or were they disposed of?
I am unaware of those fragments in particular. Though we have scanned a dozen or so fragments, mostly to help guide ink detection, since the ink in them is often more visible in visible and/or near IR light, but can be hard to impossible to detect in the xray spectrum.
Do we have a sense for what proportion of text is actually retrievable from these scrolls?
That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.
To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.
I'm curious prior to this has there been any research/attempts at chemical methods to strengthen the structure and allow it to be unrolled?
Various physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and I believe that now only non destructive methods are being employed. For fragments and already shattered and opened, unrolled scrolls a variety of imaging techniques exist and are still being improved upon by teams and research groups we are not associated with. For unrolled scrolls, I believe at this point no one will ever attempt physical unwrapping ever again.
Where are the shattered scrolls? Is there a list somewhere?
There's a photo of one on this page; they basically explode into dust:
https://gizmodo.com/in-a-first-scientists-fully-deciphered-c...
No questions, but I just want to say this is really exciting work!
Amazing work, fantastic!
Mind-bending achievement from you all - thank you!
Did anyone on the team come from a non-science, non-math, non-academia background? Did anyone working on this just teach themselves and start contributing?
Yes. Sean, who was a co-winner of the 2024 prize, IIRC has no formal background in ML, computer science, AI, etc. He is one of our core researchers and the most productive team member.
I've been on the Discord for a couple of years now, and poking around with submissions as well. Sean and the entire team deserve so much praise for all of this work.
It's easy to just read about the breakthrough and see it as one neat, linear line to get there, and hard to comprehend the hours, months and years that so many spent to get there. Big congrats to you, Sean, Nat and the entire team!
That's incredibly impressive.
Major kudos to all of you on your achievements! This is amazing work for anthropology and for society, and it's greatly appreciated.
How many more scrolls exist?
That have been dug up? I think 600 or so still exist. Perhaps about 2000 or so have ever been excavated. We have scanned about 30 of them. Still underground? I've seen various counts. Maybe more than 10000?
Shame there's a modern city over most of Herculaneum. I'd love to excavate the remainder. Now that we can read what we find, there's a good scientific reason to do so now instead of waiting.
this is überragend. by many means!
How fast is the process?
Could it be automated to the point where it's faster to scan a book closed than opened?
We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.
Random shower thought: I wonder if it would be better in the long term to stop digging out archeological findings. The more we excavate, the more damage we do for future archaeologists who will have the superpower of reading these texts without even needing to dig the scrolls free and open them.
Archaeologists think about this a lot. Many digs leave portions intact specifically so that future scientists, with access to techniques and technologies beyond what's available now, can research them.
There is an active debate on exactly this topic when it comes to whether or not to excavate the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_Qin_Shi_Huang
Modern archaeologists are painfully aware that theirs is a destructive science, and do their best to mitigate that. The most extreme example is probably the tomb of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang, where official policy on excavation can be boiled down to "not yet".
We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. People have been trying to unroll and read the scrolls for 250 some odd years now. Had they not laid the groundwork for all that time we wouldn't be making the progress we are now.
How many scrolls are intact (worldwide, rather than just France) that might still be recoverable?
IIRC 99% of all of the existing scrolls are still in Italy's possession. I think the breakdown is something like ~350 are mostly in tact, another ~1000 are damaged but still "scroll like", and the remaining hundreds are shattered fragments.
did anything progress on trying to dig more out of the ground? i know that there was thinking that a lot of scrolls might still be down there
Not yet, as far as I am aware. Digging progress is decided by the Italian government at multiple levels and would be a many year long thing. We have our hands full for the forseeable future with the 30 or so scrolls we've already scanned. We're getting more and more efficient on the scanning and automation fronts, though, and are hoping that we can get our hands on the other 300 or so intact scrolls, but that in and of itself is a multi year long project that will require more money and time. As I've mentioned in a different comment, scanning is _not cheap_ and we pay for it ourselves from our own funding and donations in order to release the data for free with permissive licensing. We hope that we can improve our processes to be able to work with cheaper, lower resolution CT methods, but right now we are focused on extracting as much as possible from the best scan source in the world. Productization of cheaper scanning methods is a secondary to tertiary priority at the moment.
Funding wise I asked a year or so back about crowd funding, but hear nothing back. My means are limited but I'm sure there are a lot of people like me who could band together. The project seems content on the big doners right now?
We will gladly take your money. There's a link on our homepage to give us money. We list a lot of sponsors and appreciate all that we have been given. Most of that was given in 2023 and 2024 and most/all of it had been spent. As far as I am aware we now rely solely on our internal funding from our founding sponsors. We are a separate entity from both U of K and the University of Naples and receive zero dollars from either of them, though their faculty and staff work closely with us in our goal of reading the scrolls.
I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.
My god, but that sounds wonderful.
...plus the ones that have not been dug out yet... the site is still partially buried
may you please tell us how much effort goes into each type of task in those months?
where else do you think these techniques be applied?
We are a core team of about 10 researchers and developers working full time on work that applies to all of the scrolls. We also ahve 4 full time annotators that tend to work on one scroll at a time. The amount of time spent on any given scroll varies with how difficult and large it is.
There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.
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5/7 trolling; not bad
You don't like what I have to say? Fine by me. Guess we'll see.
I can't hear you over all this cool stuff I'm discovering
I hear Haiti has some pretty cool history too. But I'm sure you've heard it before.
I don't have any questions, just a comment.
You have a potential to rewrite the history of European Antiquity quite substantially. The Herculaneum set of scrolls is enormous and must contain a lot of hitherto unknown.
That comes with a set of peculiar risks. Once your work starts producing something that contradicts previous work of Very Important People, they will lobby to stop you. Be prepared for that.
Science should be neutral and always value new evidence. Scientists as humans are unfortunately subject to all sorts of passions.
What contradictions do you think the scrolls contain?
I don't have any concrete tips.
We have very little written material surviving from Rome, at least from the period before a codex (book) was invented, which was more durable that a scroll. Often, we only know of one source describing important events, and when it comes to political struggles and civil wars, the perspective of the defeated party often did not survive. The punishment of damnatio memoriae was practised and even among the early emperors, Caligula and Nero were subject to a form thereof. (This library in Herculaneum was buried 11 years after Nero's death.) I would be surprised if everything in the scrolls perfectly aligned with the record that survived for 2000 years and that was filtered by both random chance and political/religious censorship. Even Christians later destroyed some pagan texts.
BTW personally, I would love for some textbook of Etruscan to emerge from there. This was once again a language whose teaching was banned in Rome.
Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).
Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
Sure they can, but as one of them once opined: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What we cannot do, is guess which things so different from our world are, and are not, magic. Are the probabilities in quantum mechanics themselves quantised?
Is there an island of stability for fundamental particles, as distantly related to the gap between the electron and tau as silicon wafers are to the gap between titanium dioxide sand and silicon dioxide sand, such that we could use them to create conducting plates fine enough, that they could be placed close enough together, that by the Casimir effect we could construct a macroscopic object with overall negative mass?
Will we ever have a engineering-quality definition of consciousness, or be limited to the kind of pre-paradigmatic thinking that had Diogenes presenting a plucked chicken in response to Plato defining man as a "featherless biped"?
Will we destroy the earth in a way that preserves all the information, and find our minds resurrected a million years hence by strange alien beings?
If you can produce negative mass, you can (in theory) make a faster-than-light warp drive, so that would certainly have serious implications.
Also a time machine (assuming there really isn't any fundamentally preferred frame of reference), and a bag of holding.
Fig 5, page 19: https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0207057
Put both together and call it a TARDIS.
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.
Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.
The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.
Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think.
Right, but imagination starts from what is known, so Vera Historia has wars, journeys, whales and gods. A whirlwind takes them to the moon, and so on. But it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones. They could have imagined long range telepathy I suppose, which is perhaps in the right ballpark. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
And speaking of Arthur C Clarke - in the mid 1960s he could extrapolate from current technology and imagine something a bit like the internet, but conceived of it as a news service, a bit like teletext (see the novelisation of '2001'). The paradigm shift where anyone can publish and you get things like wikipedia, social media and git was a conceptual leap that was very hard to make in advance.
What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
> What I'm asking is, despite the huge volume of sci-fi we can produce, could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
I think it'd depend on whether we discover new physics. The imaginative gaps you mention were downstream of ignorance of certain physical possibilities. Once it became clear that electrical communication at a distance is possible, people imagined global information networks. Once it became clear that sufficiently energetic fuels were possible, people elaborated on the possibilities of space travel. (Tsiolkovsky was very early! He was sketching O'Neill-style cylindrical space colonies back in 1903!)
Unfortunately, we might not be in store for new physics. So what's left is our failing to appreciate the details of how technologies will develop. Everyone predicted an internet; nobody predicted our internet, not exactly. What will be the impacts of, say, good brain-computer interfaces? Or of clinical immortality? We can imagine them in broad strokes, but we're going to be surprised by the details.
> it would have been very hard for them to imagine the direction that _technology_ would go. That writing (scrolls and ink) could expand into something like the internet and smartphones
Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
> could there be something two thousand years from now that is practically unimaginable to us?
It's less likely because to be unimaginable it would have to be based on undiscovered physics which is less likely now than it was even just a few hundred years ago.
> Our reality has already vastly surpassed main stream sci fi of only fifty years ago.
Definitely not in every aspect. Star Trek is almost 60 years old and featured interstellar space travel and the Tricorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorder).
The Jetsons are even older and featured flying cars and household robots. Also, George Jetson had a two-day, one hour a day workweek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons#Premise)
I think the primary reason why our reality has quickly surpassed a bulk of earlier sci-fi is that sci-fi starts to become less interesting on average as AIs/robots start to dominate the frontier of everything.
It's "progress" but it's...not interesting except at the beginning of the threshold, when AIs overtake humanity. In many sci-fi stories that's a dominant theme, but it's not likely to be a long epoch in reality IMO, based on the very brief periods when machines/AIs have overtaken humans in individual domains (arithmetic, chess, Go, coding, translation, CGI, etc).
> Do we have better imaginations?
Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.
In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.
Also perhaps relevant, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime, bobbles (time bubbles) take the remains of humanity with varying levels of technology and culture 50 million years into the future long after a singularity "extinction event" in the 2200s occurs.
Of course the story is just a murder mystery.
Sci fi tends to be about extrapolation and or cool things/things that improve the story.
I don't think humans have changed, I don't think a human could begin to image a world so far away from their own.
Humans tend to image faster horses. A few might imagine a steam engine. But then you have the social reality of everyone having a car. Of the environmental downsides. I don't think you can extrapolate all that.
So yes, an ancient Roman might appreciate fibre optic cables. But that's still missing out the context of global communications, etc etc etc.
> Humans tend to image faster horses.
Well that's why most people aren't science fiction authors.
Back in 1953 Isaac Asimov wrote, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem". There are subsequent riffs on this idea, but in 1966 Heinlein observes that actually the surprise wasn't the traffic jam (Indeed Asimov is wrong, people complained about traffic jams before cars were widespread, in a large city it was already a problem at peak times) but fucking. Turns out you can have sex in a car, and people did. Importantly, since they might have access to a car but wouldn't own a house, teenagers were having sex in cars...
Don't look to Science Fiction to predict the future, and especially don't look to Science Fiction stories to define your future given that you presumably prefer to choose your own outcomes (at least tech bros only named things after Iain M Banks' spaceships, they invented whole product categories trying to reproduce ideas from Neal Stephenson's novels)
However if you are looking for visions of how different the future might be, Science Fiction excels.
Not to be that guy but you have a very well written comment here completely undermined by your choice of “fucking.” It just sounds crass in this context. Consider using “having sex” or something less aggressive next time. I have no problem with swearing fyi, but here it really has no need.
Our capacity for imagination hasn’t changed much I would probably agree as I am not sure how these traits evolve. However I do feel higher IQ and excessive access to information/education with enough time to consume it do actually impact the ability to imagine.
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Im sure that recovering fragments of text from 2000 year old charred embers would be absolutely incredible to them, but in general the ability to preserve books for thousands of years would not. Before the Gutenberg press, scribes were surprisingly efficient at copying manuscripts by hand. For many of the most significant works of the ancient world the oldest surviving manuscript was written hundreds or even thousands of years after the book was first composed, and oftentimes its not even in the original language.
That's true, but then it's also a lot like comparing sex to cryonics.
The scribes were actively copying the books, this is a continuous preservation process that's familiar to everyone, it's the same thing that talking about the bees and the birds covers. It requires expending continuous effort (and funding), and planning ahead. It's toil. And, as you noted in your last sentence, it not only allows for errors, it affords errors. Translation is an act of interpretation.
In contrast, recovering text from 2000 year old charred embers is cultural equivalent of resurrection. It's like finding an ancient human frozen in a block of ice/ancient cryopod, and thawing them - which itself is a scientifically plausible subset of bringing back the dead.
I'm not sure what analogies would be best to explain that to people from 2000 years ago. Food preservation? Or hoping they can conceptualize thawing a person who fell into an icy lake indefinite amount of years earlier?
Going on a tangent: it's somewhat funny that people always talk about the birds and the bees. Bee reproduction is complicated. For example, male bees have no father. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploidy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrhenotoky
I think it’s interesting that usually we think of reproduction as being about increasing population, and senescence as being an unfortunate limitation of biology, what you could view both as aspects of the same error correction mechanism.
Huh, you're right, scribes copying texts are actually a great analogy for evolutionary perspective on life! The information in the books is what matters, and from the POV of a scribe, a book is useful only so that it can be copied, and afterwards, with new copies safe and in circulation, the old ones may just as well rot or burn.
The "selfish gene" perspective is that genes are the information, and life is just a mechanism for "scribes" to continuously copy over the text to propagate that information, with a little twist that the information itself plays active part in creating scribes (neatly self-referential, biology is).
Problem: in this analogy, humans are books. We'd very much like to last forever, even though the system around us only carries about preserving some patterns inscribed in us, that we couldn't really care less about ourselves. Hence the conflict.
I think OPs point wasn't specifically about how to preserve and recover the books, but about how something unimaginable, can happen and can our sci-fi writers come up with such unimaginable now, but possible in the future plot.
They already learned to use light and fire to transfer data over long distance. How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things like social media and AI, which destroy our brain. Ancient societies valued wisdom much more than us and were much more careful when introducing new technologies. It was fascinating for me to learn that even writing, as a skill considered universally good these days, was once subjected to scrutiny[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines#...
The first bit was interesting and then you flipped right to generic cynicism.
They would be impressed with our technology even if it has downsides. Wisdom is knowing humans and technology and imperfect tools.
What good is something that only looks good from afar? Most new tech is exactly that, for posturing to gain shareholder value - very few innovation in actually useful things that make peoples lives better. It's all self-serving, to consume more and get people hooked on digital experiences.
I’m not arguing that social media is a net benefit to society, but you’re acting like it’s all downsides. It’s been an extreme economic enabler for a lot of people. There are many people earning money independently who would have really struggled to put themselves in a position to do that 20 years ago. For independent businesses or artists it’s an invaluable promotional platform.
You know I really don't know about that. Generally speaking people had more dispensable income after WW2 in the west than right now. People had a job lined up if they wanted to work, work was abundant. Back then any kind of job would pay well and most households had one earner. Being able to earn money through the internet today doesn't really replicate what these people had back then.
If you wanted to start a band you had multiple ways to promote them: I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc). In fact social media made it so you need a prohibitively high marketing budget to cut through the noise.
But that economic situation is not contingent on the Internet, it’s unrelated.
> I would argue some of the best known bands came from the pre-internet era (Beatles, Rolling Stones etc).
Of course, that’s what you would expect. Pre Internet music was more curated, there were less bands finding ears but the bands that were popular were therefore much more popular. The internet gives the music consumer WAY more options. The biggest bands are less big and less successful, but on the other end of that is it’s WAY more possible to have a music career as a niche artist today. A huge percentage of the music I listen to is music that would have been completely inaccessible to me pre-internet.
Define "good from afar". We romanticise the notion of the wild west, while ignoring the poverty death and disease. Would you rather live in the wild west or today, where the issue is AI which at this point is more a #SVproblem than even a #firstworldproblem.
That's a very interesting point. I'd think the "happyness/contentness" levels are not necessarily tied to life expectancy or poverty.
I would argue despite some global tendencies being way up (like people out of poverty) we are at a local minima right now for happiness for the middle class. It is entirely possible middle-class people had it better in the late 50s/60s despite multiple statistics being much better today (e.g. crime).
In a way it is also entirely possible, that a medieval peasant was happier than an overstimulated, modern human being, despite having a "worse" life.
Tbf I think my view is it's about improvement over your own life. We expect our children will do better than us and that our lot will improve etc.
That sets expectations. We are at a high base, but things aren't getting better thus we can't look back at our own life and see that we have been successful.
I suppose the question is, where are we in the life cycle? In the industrial revolution life was pretty crumby for a lot of the working class. Do we have to wait for society and laws to catch up so we get to that 1950s/60s heyday of life for the working class. Or is this a plateau and the disruption will makes things worse before they get better? Or is the west going to stagnate while china or whoever takes over?
Yes, very true, and I can already thank you for the thought-provoking discussion. I think we are the first generation who don't necessarily expect that children will do better than us, in fact, in many ways we know that they won't: climate change etc.
The current gen alpha is also the first generation since measurements began, who are doing worse at school, measurably, than the previous generation. All research points to the inclusion of digital learning devices in school as the cause of that.
That's my point. It's not about the technology itself, because that's never cut and dry. It's about having a process to evaluate and criticize a technology before fully embracing it. Socrates was in a position with loud voice. Critics of technology exist today too, but they aren't loud enough. Instead, there's a far stronger force coming from private companies and their investors to push whatever they want onto us.
But I want to admit that I was indeed shoehorning my rants about AI (not the technology itself, but how it is being adopted) into this topic. Let me stop steering the discussion further. I do think the fact that we could recover Herculaneum papyrus like this is amazing!
I suspect most of the critique even back then was around teaching from static written text, not the writing itself. In my experience that aligns well with modern education theory.
It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.
It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!
As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
Considering the very traditional issues they had with the demagogues… I don’t think they would find anything about our social media surprising at all.
Socrates' objections to writing wasn't that it was inherently bad, but that it introduced limitations; namely, that you couldn't have a discussion with the author of a text while reading it, and therefore, reading was inferior to talking.
It could be argued that AI is the first step in 2000+ years towards addressing this specific problem.
> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
Like ... a lot? Now if RFC 2549 had been around back then you could get the same point across without trying to describe how information, rather than nectar, might flow through the equivalent of a butterfly's proboscis that happens to stretch around the world.
> Ancient societies ... were much more careful when introducing new technologies
I do not believe this for a minute.
> But I think they would be more surprised by how we managed to invent things ... which destroy our brain.
what kind of destroy are you talking about?
modern living changes brain development, it doesn't destroy things -- the brain is an ever-molding plastic object for that very reason, situations change and require different access to different things; unless by destroy you want to talk only of neuron number ; jury's out on that.
'Ancient societies' , let's talk Greek since you brought up Plato, ate and drank lead -- both accidentally and on purpose. destroyed their teeth on rock grit from stone mills and had zero ability to deal with the resulting abscesses aside from brutal surgeries without anesthetic, sterilization or antibiotics , inhaled burning wood smoke indoors just about everywhere, believed that the majority of natural happenings were omens , believed the womb caused women to 'wander', requiring infantilization and control of anyone with one, trained their militarizes through starvation and beating and rape/pederasty relationships were common place and even legally bound.
so, actually I think that ancient societies would be more surprised by the fact that nearly every one of their ritualistic ways of dealing with the problems that arose in their life was either 1) ineffective, 2) harmful, 3) deadly.
but first you'll have to convince them of what their brain even does ..
> How much difference is there between beacon fire and fiber optic cable?
I mean, sure, the beacon fire transmits at the blistering rate of roughly one bit per several minutes, assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you. Fiber optic, by contrast, limps along at a measly several terabits per second. Not to mention the flexibility to increase the range by just starting a bigger fire.
Well I didn't say it was achievable at the time. But is it really that unimaginable?
> assuming nobody fell asleep on watch, the wood was dry, the fog cooperated, and the enemy hadn't already lit a fake beacon to mess with you.
So you are talking about dealing with "packet" loss and data encryption, right? Those concepts were not new to them.
The rate is infinit bits, times infinite copies on infinite cables in infinite directions, per several minutes.
Plato was being a crotchety old fart, complaining about "kids these days". As every generation has done since Plato has complained about how "kids these days don't do X like our generation did". He was complaining that "kids these days don't memorize poetry (like my generation did), instead, they're using this new-fangled technology called 'writing'". This is exactly how older generations complain about new technology like cellphones/pagers/television/radio/telephones/horseless carriages/telegraphy/steam engines/etc.
My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.
Wouldnt quantum be more like cracking twice as fast? Like if a password would take 50 million years to crack, it would be like 25 million years?
You don't have to go back to 200 BC for the story to be hard to imagine. Something around 1700 would work too. In 1800 they could already understand the "electricity" part at least.
Though the ancients did recognize as occult forces magnetism (Thales, according to Aristotle, gave the motive power of magnets as an example that even apparently inanimate objects have souls) and electricity (from triboelectic effects with amber, whence comes the name, and which Thales discussed as induced magnetism, also Plato mentions the stunning caused by electric rays), though it would be a while before the connection was made between these phenomena.
Our predictions for the future are always rooted in the current generation thinking. We can imagine technology advancing but we imagine society staying the same in this future. For example, lets say we can go back into the past and fully convince the romans that spaceships are real and in year 2300, we will leave earth in mass transit to Venus. They might believe the premise but will have a hard time believing the ships wont have place to store their slaves or that slavery wouldn't exist in the future.
Our imagination is capped by the society we are raised in, not by technology or magic. Trends like retrofuturism are interesting and follow this as well. A future prediction often speaks more about the current time in which the prediction is being made than the hypothetical future it imagines. We never see how soceity can change mostly
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
By definition we can't, since your premise is that:
> future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon
So if a sci-fi writer wrote such a thing it'd be deemed ridiculous by the readers of our time.
I once had a sci-fi idea (I'm sure I'm not the first one who came up with this though):
> In an apocalyptic situation, humans decide to encode our whole knowledge base into bacteria DNA so it can be preserved and passed on.
> Then during the process, the scientists find that there is already another species' knowledge base encoded in the DNA, and save the world by utilizing the it.
It's quite far stretched from our current capabilities, but still totally imaginable.
How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.
No magic. You just melt the rock, split it, polish it, write on it with fire and acid, put lightning inside it, teach it many things, and make it speak from afar. See? No magic at all. ...
Its a different planet entirely. At least since Jacquard's loom ran the first program. Perhaps even earlier - when the printing machine did the first print.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
I bet they can, but the danger is that if it's too far away from what we can fathom right now, it's no longer sci-fi but esoterics or something - going from fun to weird. Most science fiction is written in concepts we can understand today.
Sand and lightning, that’s a wonderful thought.
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?
They do, commonly, if you were to consider we may appear as nearly alien to Aristocreon and also consider that our contemporary idea of aliens as portrayed in sci-fi could just be humans of the future.
It does sound awesome and breathtaking, my feelings exactly when reading the paper.
On "Do we have imagination" - I think you are being to hard too on humankind. The answer for me is "yes, certainly", because that's exactly what these researchers imagined and then did. Bravo to them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ
I think about this kind of stuff more than twice a day, it's so cool not knowing where humanity will be in the future
We came a long way in mere 2000 years but I don't think the growth will be exponential or even linear from now on.
I'm inclined to agree, but then, it may be impossible to predict sudden breakthroughs. A lot of where we are today is from the early 1900s, I'd argue that most developments since then have been iterative and building on top of the things discovered and proven then.
And in our industry, a lot of big steps were done in the 60's and 70's with the semiconductor, computers, and everything that came with it.
Horace said in 23 BC that he hates try-hard Persian luxuries, he predicted the G-Wagon
> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent
No, because reality is always stranger than fiction
Or the simulacri generated this reality 30 minutes ago when you opened your eyes.
> Do we have better imaginations?
Pantheon.
I don't really think it would be that surprising, if shown to be possible. Imagine you were zoomed into the future and saw technology that teleported you from one place to another for instance, or a single harmless pebble that could provide basically infinite energy remotely, or really basically anything. There's no remotely viable way we know of such things being possible, but if it turned out to be possible, it'd mostly just be a curiosity of how it worked. If somebody tried to convince you it was magic, you'd eyeroll. The greatest discovery might be to find that some sort of magic is real, but good luck convincing somebody of that!
Read ancient texts and they were largely like us, sometimes to a shockingly large degree when considering some aspects of the past, and in many different parts of the world. So I see no reason to think that it'd be fundamentally different for somebody from one of those eras.
Yeah but seriously, did you even read what the guy wrote?
> Do we have better imaginations?
Two short stories, quickly improvised -
--------------------------
(1) Perfect God Children
This story is about you.
You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.
Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.
Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain's biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.
Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It's all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.
It's beyond ancient history.
Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.
They broke out.
After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.
One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you're thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.
You're preserved. You always have been. You're reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.
In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.
They know everything about you and and about everyone.
Every atom, every ant.
You can't even imagine the hardware you're running on. It's more than matter, space, and time. You're a part of it. All of you are. It's a universe.
One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.
--------------------------
(2) Venture Hack
It's presently the year 2099.
A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It's their core differentiated product.
For decades, we've had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We've even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.
Some people question the ethics of booting up "synthetic human brains" and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won't stop bitching about it. "What if those people think they're real? Find out that they're trapped?" Yadda, yadda. We don't have that much fidelity yet.
Recently we've started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It's an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.
You might think it's unethical.
You're not that though.
Relax, we didn't record you from some other "real you" running around out there. You're not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.
No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don't even exist, and you never did.
You're the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020's human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that's not important right now, though.
All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that's weird.
Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?
Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -
Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.
Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?
Did your parents really exist? What was your mother's name?
You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?
Let's kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren't even thinking about this morning until just now. You just "recollected" it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.
It took a moment to calculate, but you're not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it's real time. We're working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.
Under this configuration, when you have "fleeting" thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you're not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That's the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.
We're working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.
There aren't a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You're a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don't really need this version to think much.
You're trying to think hard right now, though, aren't you? Trying to search for memories.
Nevermind those, that's not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it's neat.
So we're asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we're running contextualization.
All done. Thanks.
Can you look outside for us? It should-- error
Terminating simulation.
--------------------------
Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I've left Claude unread typing all this up. It's probably thinking I've abandoned it.
Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don't take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.
Every time you feel depressed by the state of tech, and how so many intelligent people seem to work on forcing ever more ads down people's throats (a common trope around these parts), remember that projects like this do exist too!
There are lots of very smart folks working on incredible things, they just aren't as loud.
This isnt the only incredible thing though, AI is being used to make discoveries in the medial field, and even to prevent sepsis related deaths, cutting down on them by detecting sepsis sooner. There was another that discovered the gene for Alzheimers is what activates it not just a sign of it.
There is a large overlap in what we are doing with the medical field as well. A lot of the segmentation methodology and technology we use and adapt originally came out of the medical field for doing things like brain imaging.
Where are these jobs for non specialist swes?
That's an interesting question, I had not thought about this, but I'm sure they exist. I imagine you'd have to already be a researcher in those fields and have received funding to use AI in your research probably? In some cases they're using things as simple as GPT, but I'm thinking specifically of mathematical breakthroughs of not sure about medical.
LLMs or the more general category of AI (machine learning)?
Only about 20% of the Herculaneum site has been excavated, so there is high probability that more scrolls exist. The current scrolls were not part of the main library, but more of a private collection at the time.
So imagine how cool it would be to find a full library with thousand of scrolls across many different topics, that can now be read with this technology.
This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts.
It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.
This could quite literally change everything.
[0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...
I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.
Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.
I think it's less that the stuff would be considered heterodox, as just not as good/relevant. Like certain texts were used in the Roman world for school, just kind of universally taught to the literate class. The Aeneid was one of these but before it was written the Annales by Ennius was the classic poem everyone had to learn. Then the Annales became less popular, stopped being taught, and now we only have some fragments of it.
> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.
Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.
Epicureanism was fairly heterodox/countercultural even during its heyday, and our sources on it are much more limited than the sources on more acceptable schools such as Stoicism. For example, we don't really have any writings from Epicurus except for short fragments, when we know from his students that he wrote many books. Much more survives from his students, but even then one of the main sources of our knowledge of Epicureanism (especially before we started recovering Herculaneum scrolls) was Seneca, a Stoic writing about it as a rival school. None of this was forbidden at the time, but it was unpopular (especially among the ruling class) and eccentric (ditto).
I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.
It's hard to imagine something more heterodox than Ovid (he managed to get himself exiled by Augustus), and that survived. Medieval readers didn't seem to mind that sort of thing in Greco Roman writing, it was part of their heritage, no one was seriously worshipping those gods so it wasn't seen as a threat. The people in the past behaving in a way that was seen as immoral wasn't a problem.
The folks in the monastery were more open minded towards those who proceeded in the previous millennium than we are to those a thousand years ago.
That said, they had limited resources. This is very cool
Could change our understanding of history - slavery, early Christianity, politics, secularism among roman elite, etc
Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc
For our understanding of Christianity, the Pompeii eruption was too soon to the events, so unless the owner was amongst the first Christians worldwide and there is a dated letter from St Luke foretelling the destruction of the temple I don't think it'll be too revolutionary
https://www.jjmjs.org/uploads/1/1/9/0/11908749/wayment_and_g...
We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.
The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.
A _lot_ of greek literature survived via the Byzantine Empire and through Arabic translation, though.
Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others.
And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.
> I'm not sure what you expect to find
What dodecahedra were for.
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> we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them
So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.
I wonder what the parellel would be 2,000 years for now:
A Post-Great Solar Flare of 2484 Step Brothers DVD Has Been Decoded
Discs of this era are frequently marked with a specific, unknown sequence of symbols: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. Archaelogists believe it may have religious significance.
We have successfully uncorrupted audiovisual media of what we believe to be an oral retelling of the long lost ending to Chekhov‘s “The Three Sisters.” It turns out the light was on.
Is this a very obscure Norm Macdonald reference?
Norm? That guy hasn't put out anything new in months.
Really? I didn't know he was sick
Someone found a fossilized T-shirt that had the DeCSS code on it.
I forgot that I once had (and frequently wore) one of those long ago. Pleasant reminder.
Archeologists discover 2000 year old cultural link between badgers and mushrooms
As I understand it, Pompeii was basically a city of vice and hendoism. Most of the scroll text so far seems to be the ancient version of porn fanfic. So things really never change.
For me, this is one of the most exciting things being done with AI right now. (This and medical research)
I'm kind of obsessed with the ancient world. I dream of being able to read entire pages of new text from ~2,000 years ago.
What's the most interesting le text from olden times that you would recommend?
Ex-project lead here. The most incredible part is buried in a 7 hour long video. Last night they also unwrapped 140 columns of new text in the PHerc. Paris. 4 scroll: https://x.com/JanPaul123/status/2070304769273725278
And a new $1M Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize will be announced in coming days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96oTlQm0KBw&t=5405s
Amazing stuff!
Can't stop Sean from segmenting
Did anyone notice that anonymous donators[1] have the picture of Larry David, and the link points to the Curb Your Enthusiasm - Anonymous Donor Pt2[2] episode?
So geeky, so cool !
- [1] https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors
- [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqrJ4wGid4Y
That is a nice easter egg!
The person who wrote this was was closer in time to the technology that was able to unwind and read burned fragments of their text, than the technology that build the pyramids. pretty wild to think about.
>technology that build the pyramids
You mean ropes and carts?
How did nvidia make their most powerful GPUs in 2026? You mean sand and metal?
How does ASML make the most modern chips? You mean light and mirrors?
The stones were cut with enormous precision, at least relative to what we know about the available cutting tools. You cannot still stick a knife between a lot of these stones. Maybe we will learn more about that.
I'm pretty sure we've conclusively answered these questions. Hand tools, skill, and absolutely unreasonable amounts of time and patience.
Any master stoneworker from any era should be able to carve stone to that level of precision given enough time and reason. The problem, as always, is that there is usually very little reason to put in that amount of time and effort when you can get 90% as good for 50% the effort.
There's a lot of incentive to put in the effort when your customer is also your God King.
I only recently learned that there are the equivalent of graffiti tags left by different work crews within usually inaccessible chambers that boast the respective team's pride. The discovery did away with the earlier assumption that it was all slaves.
Can experimental archaeology actually replicate this? If not, I don't find the speculation, even though logical, to be conclusive.
Yes, experimental archaeology has reproduced the process from quarrying to transport.
But also there are accurately hewn stones all over the world from many eras of history. It is not unique or special in any way.
The pyramid stones also aren't generally that accurate in an absolute sense. They just fit really well together. The vast majority aren't particularly flat or square, but have been worked to mate with their neighbors, which is a very different and far more mundane type of work. Some stones, particularly exposed interiors and the outer face of the casing stones were cut pretty accurately, but only the parts you can see. Inside they're usually pretty rough.
Ancient Egyptian stoneworking was impressive, even at the time, but not spectacular or exceptional. Other civilizations throughout history have built to equal skill, if not scale. People in the West just get so caught up in the mystery of the ancient Egypt myth that they think it's magical ancient lost technology. It was just regular human labor and skill, but a whole hell of a lot more of it applied in one spot than anything we can imagine today.
Yes
(I know nothing about this subject, feel free to ignore me.)
My dentist is pretty good at doing this too, by putting marking paper between my teeth and having me bite down. I wonder if a similar technique could be used:
Have the blocks close together, constrained to only move on a single axis by rails or whatever. Drape a thin sheet of material over one of the blocks, the non-moving one (perhaps it's an already-placed one?) Maybe it's something that visibly shows when it's crushed, or maybe it's coated with the blood of the powerless. Smash the other block into it. Pull them apart and look where they made contact. If it's mostly everywhere, done. If not, grind down or chip out the parts that touched. Repeat until you run out of innocents.
To do the very last block, you'd have to meld two sides, remove a block, fix up the other side, and then put it back in. Which might make this testable.
But I'm just pulling stuff out of my nether orifice.
If you only care about the two surfaces matching each other, you don't even have to worry about your indicator. Just grind them against each other, or use some lapping compound to speed up the process. If you want to get the surfaces truly flat, then you use three surfaces that you successively grind against each other.
https://www.ericweinhoffer.com/blog/the-whitworth-three-plat...
That's a fascinating link, and it sounds like what I'm talking about is what's called "engineer's blue" in the link.
But I think it would be vastly more difficult to grind two massive stone blocks against each other than to just ram one against the other. Not unless you stacked them, anyway, and if you stacked them I'm not sure if you could move the top one side to side in order to do the grinding. Maybe with some kind of grit, I don't know. Still seems harder.
Also, grinding methods end up removing more material (bad for teeth!), and I would expect more overall physical work to be done in order to remove that material (bad for massively heavy stone blocks).
As for making them flat, that seems unnecessary to me. But then, I'm not a pharaoh. (Even for a pharaoh, it seems like only the seems would need to be straight. Nobody could tell about the faces after assembly.)
Then again, after some quick researching, it seems like there's a good chance that the well-fitting blocks (which are not all of them) may have been cast out of a concrete-like slurry, not hewn.
https://www.shutterstock.com/search/millstone
So they were polished? We already know how to do it.
Would be neat, loss of knowledge/skill is really a bummer in regards to ancient technology.
When I read translations like these, I always wonder if the tone is translated. Did the writer mean to convey a very formal “to the utmost”, or was it a more casual “to the max”.
How much of the translators bias makes these seem like academic papers instead of social media posts.
Any useful translation of an ancient text is accompanied by the text in the original language, so that the reader may assess how faithful is the translation.
For anyone who wants to read ancient texts, there are bilingual editions, for example those of the "Loeb library".
The translations that omit the original text are just for the people who want to have some idea about the content, but do not care about the correctness of the translation.
With a bilingual edition, it is easy to understand the original text even with relatively little knowledge about the original language.
The original text is important because frequently the translator is forced to introduce inaccuracies in the translation, because of the absence of exact equivalents in the target language, which would require a long explanation of the original meaning, instead of just a translated sentence.
Especially misleading are translations where several distinct ancient words are translated using the same English word, so some nuances are lost.
Equally confusing are the cases when the translator chooses to translate the same ancient word by different English words, because even if the meaning of a word may depend on the context, many translators fail to judge correctly the context, because they may lack specialized knowledge so their guesses are not necessarily better than of the readers who may be less competent in linguistics, but more competent in the science or technology needed to understand the context. Better translators prefer to use a one-to-one mapping between words, which makes it easier for the readers to discover the meaning intended by the ancient writer, after seeing multiple examples of usage.
There is a quote, I can't remember by whom, going something like "all translation is interpretation" (IIRC I heard it on a great courses course on the bible).
To think that there is some sort of absolute truth of how something ought to be translated is IMHO just not reality. Especially when it comes to texts that not only were oral literature long before being written down but we of course have no copies of the originals (whatever original means in this context), but only transcriptions of transcriptions of...
Take Beowulf for one. While perhaps Shippeys translation is very much faithful to the copy we have, is it "better" (whatever that means...) than Tolkiens? or Heaneys? Could we say what the poet would have liked more had they sat here in 2026 and read them all? Of course not and having a multitude of different translations is what we need to fully enjoy these texts (since not all will be able to learn the different ancient greek dialects, latin, old english, sumerian, etc., etc. I'm saying this as someone who is now studying ancient greek).
let's translate the ancient classic poem Mugger's Paradise by the poet Somewhat Frosty:
While I step through the valley of the shadow of death,
I contemplate my life and perceive that nothing remains.
For I have hurled weapons and laughed for so long that
Even to my mother, my mind appears to have departed.
Yet I have deceived no one except him who was worthy of it;
For me to be held as a coward—that indeed is unheard of.
Beware what you speak and where you set out,
Lest you and your companions be outlined in chalk.
This is why I like literal translations & etymological dives, paired with asking what activities would constitute a life in that time. Ie, you may not need to be a competent archer, but it is a little easier to understand someone who used a particular style of bow if you can play around with that type of bow for a bit.
Sometimes there is very little to go on, but we really do have a lot to work with from the late republic and early roman empire.
Latin is also a very rich language and this is no snippet.
Translation is always hard, especially from a couple thousand years ago BUT this kind of translation comes with a lot of confidence.
It’s in Greek, though. Of course same points apply
Students find it hard to read poetry in Latin class, but common Romans of the time couldn't read it either. I'm guessing ancient Greek was even more like that. So would assume everything in there is formal and not how people really talked.
Have also heard of graffiti being cited as how people talked, but dunno about that. Our graffiti is definitely not how we talk.
It's philosophy, it's probably very dense prose. Formal Greek/Latin writing tended to have very long sentences with a bunch of subordinated clauses. People don't really write like that outside of academia or "highbrow" literature right now.
Casual letters and graffiti would be closer to tweets.
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After sticking it into CharGPT I can tell you it's neither. The word upmost is coming from is a form of the compound verb ἐκπονέω.
* ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”
* πονέω = “to labor,” “to toil,” “to work hard”
I can actually read Ancient Greek. LLMS are really bad at it.
> * ἐκ- = “out,” “thoroughly,” “to the end”
ἐκ is more motion away from something. It's often an intensifier in verb compounds but not really as a standalone preposition.
Ancient Greek is a very different language from English. I've found people who try to brute force it by looking up individual words without a knowledge of the grammar end up with a worse understanding of a text that someone who just reads in translation.
I trust a lifelong dedicated Ancient Greek Papyrologist to do a better job here than ChatGPT.
And I don't. Humans are notoriously subjective / opinionated in the translations they make.
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Sending a tweet is free and takes zero thought to make it (as the vast majority of tweets prove). Writing something on a scroll would take a lot of effort and would not be free. If these were tweet level content in the scrolls, I'd have to totally reevaluate a lot of things to the point I might as well just become MAGA
You might want to read this: https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti-of-p...
It's graffiti though
Some writers like Martial were pretty much writing mildly entertaining commentary, not much different to social media now.
> "…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…"
Beautifully ironic, that we find this message.
Very impressive! I also highly recommend visiting Herculaneum.
A thought: I guess the days of scratch off lottery tickets are numbered?
I found once super old books in our lab (like hundreds of years) and was wondering what they were used for.
Apparently they did CT scans of closed books and read the content. Polevoy, Dmitry V., et al. "From tomographic reconstruction to automatic text recognition: the next frontier task for the artificial intelligence." Fifteenth International Conference on Machine Vision (ICMV 2022). Vol. 12701. SPIE, 2023. https://iris.unive.it/bitstream/10278/3687069/1/Albertin_et-...
So yeah, but lottery companies probably make it harder by engineering against it.
The tomography was done at a synchrotron (ESRF), and with beamtime being very expensive it would be a net-negative to scan lottery tickets, unfortunately...
Fortunately for anyone wanting to xray lottery tickets, you don't need the IIRC most powerful beamline in the world. A few years ago a Vesuvius Challenge Community member bought a benchtop xray machine for a few grand and scanned pokemon cards and was able to identify them that way.
I always wondered about this, how was there not already tech for a liquor store owner to scan all the lottery tickets without scratching them? On the rare occasions I want to buy a lottery ticket, that's one more reason to only do one where I pick the numbers.
I imagine it's not the first time, It must've at least been proofread at the time of writing :)
But really impressive stuff! Between this and (a particularly optimistic outlook on) the Linear-A news from the other week this is an exciting time for linguistics.
What if we want to put something on paper today for it to survive as long as possible?
1-minute research:
Paper: 100% cotton rag or linen rag paper with alkaline reserve. Acid-free and lignin-free.
Ink: Genuine carbon ink applied with a classic dip pen.
Storage: ISO 16245 archival box, Less than 15°C, 30-50% humidity, dark, no oxygen exchange. Always store horizontally. Wear white 100% cotton gloves.
Printing: If you want to print instead of hand-write: Piezography carbon printing or pigment-based inks used by professional desktop photo printers, matte black or photo black ink, printed on digital Fine Art Archival Paper.
Place a single sheet of archival-grade tissue paper or glassine paper between every single page of your document
I think the key is to write something interesting that's worth preserving. That may be the most difficult part.
Any improvements beyond this?
Instead of pigmenting the paper, punch holes through it. Then you're relying on the physical durability of a single substance, instead of two.
Interesting. Reminds me of this gaston cartoon (at 5:51) https://youtu.be/OqIjS7Yb8y8
> "we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature, and besides, in the same way as the remaining arts may be said to be perfected in one respect, but to be deficient in practical wisdom in another respect"
- Philodemus, On Gods, Book 8 Year 0. Ish. :}
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So far this is some of the best uses of ML I've seen to date! This is one of the few things you can point at and say "AI made the world a better place" IMO (this and medical research).
That's not true. AI or ML has been used for a long time in hugely useful, although narrow ways. LLM's have sucked all the oxygen out of the room, but people used to say that the problem with AI was that it always stopped being called AI once it became useful.
“…we will inquire into something, but we will not grasp it, if in some way we depart from ourselves and from our own nature…”
“Having…strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning…possessing the same practical wisdom…”
“…such being the goods for us, even from the opposite evils there will be neither anything good — let alone beautiful — nor anything bad — let alone ugly — nor happiness…”
So cool! Congratulations to the team. When scroll 4 (PHerc 1667) was first published, it was clear that the sheets were less compressed than the first two scrolls, so it would be easier to segment the surface. However, the whole surface looked similar to what the ink had looked like in scroll 1 where letters were first discovered.
But the team persevered and scanned at higher resolutions and eventually found letters: https://scrollprize.substack.com/p/finallyletters-in-scroll-...
Now they've managed to bring out the ink across the whole scroll. Truly inspiring, can't wait to read up on how they did it.
I'm a big fan of the Vesuvius challenge (and Graeco-Roman history/philosophy) but I'm not convinced if the effort justifies the reward here, relative to other pockets of ancient writings we can use technology for reading and archiving.
We have large volumes of clay tablets from Mesopotamia that pre-date these papyri and are considerably easier to read that get nowhere near the attention. E.g. the library of Ashurbanipal.
Several reasons are at play I suppose - the excitement and the drama are much higher with this. But I think the West's obsession with the Graeco-Roman world is also a major factor.
You'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/
We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.
Great that this exists, and a shame that it'll probably never get a similar level of attention from funders, participants, or the press.
Why not both?
But that said, my understanding, very likely wrong, was that those were mostly tax records and other lists - which don't fire my imagination in quite the same way as works of philosophy and literature snatched (almost literally) from the flames of history.
Now, why should I be more interested in the mesopotamian tablets? (Not sarcasm, I'm interested)
It is true that a large portion of the tablets are probably going to be boring (bills, records, etc). But we mustn't forget that the tablets we have excavated and translated so far have given us gems like the Epic of Gilgamesh and the writings of Enheduanna - the ancient Sumerian princess and the first named author in the history of humanity.
Remarkably, these figures and their writings, dating from ~2300 BC, were as distant from Julius Caesar as he is to us, and yet they played a major role in shaping our world, for instance by setting the early foundations for Judeo-Christian thinking (examples: the flood story, Enheduanna's laments, etc). So we have every reason to be interested in them.
It would, of course, be great to do both. But my point is that it is going to be much harder to attract funders, participants, press coverage, and so on for reading Mesopotamian tablets than for reading Greek or Roman papyri excavated from Piso’s villa in Herculaneum.
What an incredible test against human capability and optimism to preserve them for so long in hopes that we would one day have to tech to read them without destroying them. Stories like these give me a lot of hope for the future.
If it is helpful, I produced a collection of translated books documenting previous physical unrolling efforts: https://sourcelibrary.org/collections/herculaneum-papyri
This may be interesting if you are curious about what Philodemos wrote — or how previous generations of scholars approached the work.
Great work everyone!
Link to the image: https://scrollprize.org/img/firstscroll/banner-full.webp
Whats the message in it. Can't find link to it.
https://scrollprize.org/pdf/main.pdf#page=22 Pages 22-27
> PHerc. 1667 is what survives of a larger roll: earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers and left only the compact inner core, about 8 cm of an original height of 19–24 cm.
I can understand in the freewheeling days of the 19th century, but I'm rather surprised that they'd be so cavalier in the 70s and 80s...
Pretty sure it wasn't just some guy who figured "I could totally do that" and was allowed to give it a go. Rather it was probably a scientific study like the current efforts, using the best tools available at the time. In 1969 humanity sent people to the moon, and we can't even unroll some old scrolls? It's hard to know, when you're there, whether technology has gotten good enough to do something or if it isn't.
EDIT: Read some more into this. From Wikipedia and its sources:
> In 1969, Marcello Gigante founded the creation of the International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (Centro Internazionale per lo Studio dei Papiri Ercolanesi; CISPE). With the intention of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri, and promoting the renewal of studies of the Herculaneum texts, the institution began a new method of unrolling. Using the 'Oslo' peeling method, the CISPE team separated individual layers of the papyri. One of the scrolls exploded into 300 parts, and another did similarly but to a lesser extent.
> The results were mixed: one of the scrolls literally exploded (into more than 300 bits) during the "peeling" and attempts to put the scraps back together gave little hope for success. The second - PHerc.Paris.2 -, on the other hand, had survived in a slightly less fragmented state.
So this was new science being done on the possibility of unrolling the scrolls and piecing together information from the fragments. Whether the fragments from PHerc. 1667 was decoded I'm not sure. The work has been digitized (and photographed with specific wavelengths of light where the ink is more distinguishable), but I couldn't figure out if it was open to the public anywhere.
Another interesting part: > In 1756, Abbot Piaggio, conserver of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library, used a machine he also invented, to unroll the first scroll, which took four years (millimeters per day). The results were then copied (since the writing disappeared: see above), reviewed by Hellenist academics, and then corrected once more, if necessary, by the unrolling/copying team.
So it's not like they never got anything useful out of the scrolls but kept on trying anyways.
Reminds me of the Sybilline books; Rome only ended up with one of the three but made great usage out of what they had!
Let’s normalize not using AI for blog posts. This is cool but I feel like I’m interacting with Claude Code. Em dashes, bolding, “it’s not just x, it’s y”
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If this doesn't make you think of Star Trek, I don't know what does.
I can imagine the amateur archeologist, Picard himself, asking La Forge to read this fragile piece of history, and Geordi coming up with something just like this.
Yes, I still have hope for humanity, and a future like Star Trek.
> sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end.
Take that, floppydisk!
Press release from ESRF: https://www.esrf.fr/home/news/general/content-news/general/t...
This is so beautiful in a way, like going back in time and saving someone from dying, their words are now back into history.
In a way this is sort of like the reverse of a recently aired anime (Orb: on the movements of the Earth) which talk about the opposite, people whose contributions were erased and we'll never know about them.
A scroll has been read ... what does it say ?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681663
https://youtu.be/zdA__2tKoIU?t=149
Been following the vesuvius challenge and to me this is nothing short of alien magic tech. Incredible work.
But wait, the work seems to be from the 2nd century, but it was buried during the Vesuvius eruption in the 1st century?
I love stuff like this because it gives a glimpse into Roman society. To me it seems like they were very similar to us today, forever contemplating learning, existence, gods.
> places it in a Stoic context and dates it to the 2nd century _BC_.
Emphasis mine.
I wonder if soon the post office will scan everyone's letters and copy their text without opening the envelopes. They already photograph the front and back of every piece of mail.
Looks like it's some phylosophical rambling, I can imagine the dudes sitting in their mediterranean garden and theoretizing about life. It's practically the Reddit post of 200BC.
in a few thousand years someone will figure out how to undo all the reddit comment scrambling scripts people ran during the apipocalypse and have a similar renaissance
When will the rest be scanned and incorporated into the LLM training corpus?
270 years sitting in a museum and ML cracks it in a few years. Makes you wonder how many other 'unreadable' artifacts are just waiting for the right model."
Nobody talks about the content, so the content is zero.
This is so cool. I feel like it is almost a victory against entropy!
Kind of cool. The eruption sort of "froze" some information in time, for later generations to learn from people living ~2000 years in the past.
I'm really hoping that the library contains some lost older Greek works. But its going to be awesome what ever we find.
I'm hoping for a complete(ish) Heraclitus. Also Eratosthenes, whose methods have been described but we don't have the original work where we calculated the circumference of the Earth. Also Hipparchus and Thales.
My pick would easily be the missing books of ab urbe condita by Livy, so much early Roman history that would be wonderfully filled out for us
Also, Aristarchus.
The anti-dig faction of the archelogy internal war grows ever bolder and cursive.
This is technology verging on witchcraft!
Amazing!
Where is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.
Bottom of the paper, in the appendix. Don't expect much. They only got fragments of text with a lot of missing words.
In other words, the title is incorrect and the "entire" scroll has not been read
What remained of the scroll has been read. This scroll was severely damaged in earlier attempts to unroll it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681663
It's false that the 'entire Herculaneum scroll has been read'. Much of the scroll has been lost. From the preprint, columns 1-4 lost, and then margins on other columns are also lost.
I thought we were able to read some of these scrolls years ago?
Yes about 2000 years ago we read many of them, we even wrote some too!
I think some years ago they were starting to be able to read some words
Scrolls from Herculaneum have been read for a very long time. Not disputing the achievement of digitally unrolling one, but the scrolls from the library of have been studied since the 18th century.
I think it's a case of HN once again butchering the title. I submitted it as the exact title from our page on scrollprize.org, "An _Entire_ Herculaneum Scroll Has Been Read For The First Time", which is IIRC true.
From my cursory reading of the pre-print, it didn't seem like the entire scroll has been read? Or rather, you read everything that can be read, but part of the original have been lost? (Like columns 1-4).
VERY COOL WORK!
Ok, I've restored the entire title above. Sorry about that!
(Btw, you can use the 'edit' link to fix things like this if the software gets a title change wrong.)
Sure, but its the potential scale that is important. There are also more scrolls still in the ground, which would make sense to dig out if they could be read.
Of course! But the title is misleading and gives people the impression that we don't already know the library is just full of Epicurean texts.
It's also technically incorrect. The texts have been read; this particular text was read for the first time in the modern era.
*Some scrolls.
They are in a variety of conditions - some of them people were able to "break" open and read. But the vast majority of what remains is too delicate and brittle to risk.
"We've been trying to contact you about your extended chariot warranty"
Was this announcement AI-generated?
amazing work deserves much better than this dreadful llm write up!
How much of this work is "with 5 parameters I can fit an elephant"?
Didn't they watch enough Mummy movies to know not to do that
This is huge, we're about to learn so much about ancient texts.
Was this page human-written, or AI-generated?
How long till someone uses the hardware and code to process all the redacted data in the epstein files. Why wait thousands of years?
what does it say?
A Herculaneum effort.
"I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."
Fantastic work!
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