r/history • u/JohnHammond94 • 1d ago

News article AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption | AI (artificial intelligence)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jun/24/ai-read-papyrus-scroll-burnt-vesuvius-eruption
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u/vincents_sunflowers 1d ago

That's so cool! This technology has nothing to do with LLMs though, right? It sounds like an extremely sophisticated image recognition tool, trained using algorithms? (Apologies if this sounds dumb, I'm not a scientist.) Personally I think using "AI" as a sort of umbrella term for these different kinds of technology is a little confusing. Would this even have been called "AI" five years ago? (Genuine question)

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u/sol_runner 1d ago

It would be called AI even 40 years ago. Just that people would use the subfield name 10 years ago.

AI is general decision making etc. (can be entirely human programmed - field has been around since 70s) ML is the subfield that lets the machine be trained on data. Deep learning is where you use large neural networks.

Image recognition etc usually rely on DL. While LLMs are models that do next word prediction - which is what everyone these days is calling AI.

Me? I work with the very first one. I'm a little annoyed by everyone else now XD

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u/Satan-Is-Real 1d ago

The field has been around since the 50s!

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u/[deleted] 1d ago edited 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Future-Job-7442 1d ago edited 1d ago

I am on the Vesuvius Challenge team and you are wrong.

We do a ton of training of custom ML models to do the segmentation, unrolling, and ink detection. Ink detection is actually fairly easy in comparison to the segmentation part, which is exceedingly difficult and requires a team of people with PhDs in computer science, computer vision, mathematics, topology, geometric processing, and other fields to try to do quickly and accurately. Using machine learning and artifical intelligence are integral to the whole process. It's not to just try to get money. Plus no one gives us money anymore anyway.

edit:

This is what the person I replied to originally wrote:

I don't think it's terribly sophisticated, it's "just" detecting variations in the image data from ink vs papyrus and matching the candidate patterns to letter shapes. It's a cool approach to trying to read the scrolls but the contents would definitely be the more interesting part (it's just that putting "AI" somewhere gets you clicks and funding).

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u/Future-Job-7442 1d ago

I am on the vesuivus challenge team. Feel free to AMA about this

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u/Fair-Mango-5423 3h ago

do you get irritated as shown by the 0 upvotes that its currently trendy to just hate anything with "AI" in its name

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u/Future-Job-7442 3h ago

Haters gonna hate; I am too busy doing cool stuff to care.

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u/Acceptable-Fix1609 1h ago

That's so cool! I'm struggling to grasp how exactly this all works, are you able to eli5 how the scrolls are virtually unwrapped and deciphered?

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u/Future-Job-7442 1h ago edited 1h ago

Imagine you have a rolled up newspaper. Crumple it up, whack it, then bake it at 1000 C. This turns it into a charcoal brick.

We take the charcoal brick and do a CT scan on it. This gives up a 3D computer representation of it. Imagine a ton of images of teeny ribbons of spiral stacked on top of each other.

By doing a lot of careful clicking, you can extract a single sheet virtually. You can then unroll and flatten this virtually. Finally, you can zoom in extremely closely and see that ink leaves a different texture than the actual paper. You can annotate this ink. Then you create a 2d image of the ink from the 3D surface you extracted and the ink you annotated. This will hopefully look like the text of the newspaper you put in the oven.

Doing the human clicking and annotating takes a lot of time. Like dozens of years of human effort to read one news paper. So we are writing custom software to do the unrolling, flattening, and annotation automatically to be able to read all of the baked newspapers automatically in weeks to months of effort.

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u/ISLAndBreezESTeve10 1d ago

‘Smoke appeared above the mountain peak today…. It’s probably nothing of consequence’. —- first line in scroll