When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 BC, the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in present-day Italy, were destroyed.
Hundreds of ancient scrolls, or documents written on papyrus, were buried and charred.
For almost 2.000 years, these ancient scrolls remained under 20 meters of volcanic mud, ash and pumice (volcanic hollow rock).
They were kept in a villa believed to have once belonged to Julius Caesar's father-in-law, the famous Roman general and statesman who became dictator before he was assassinated.
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When the ancient remains of Pompeii were finally excavated in the 18th century, more than 600 still-rolled papyrus scrolls were found.
They were preserved by a volcanic eruption, but at the same time they were so fragile that they would crumble to dust if they were mishandled.
For hundreds of years, the challenge remained how to read the scrolls without unrolling and damaging them.
In March of this year, the Vesuvius Challenge was launched, a computer and machine learning competition to read these Herculaneum scrolls.
The University of Kentucky recruited scientists to use artificial intelligence to decipher words from X-ray images of unrolled scrolls.
Those images were taken in 2019 by Professor Brent Sills from the university's EdjusLab, when he scanned the scrolls from Herculaneum in a particle accelerator, generating 3D CT scans in very high resolution.
Luke Faritor, a 40.000-year-old computer science student from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was the first person to read a word from the Herculaneum Scroll and won $XNUMX for it.
He created an artificial intelligence program to detect charred ancient letters written on papyrus and managed to detect a dozen of them.
Among these letters, papyrologists - scholars who specialize in works on papyrus - were later able to identify the word πορφυρας or porphyras, the ancient Greek word for purple.
To win the prize, he had to find at least 10 letters on a surface of four square centimeters of the scroll.
"I saw the letters and I freaked out," he said at a press conference announcing the discovery.
"I freaked out, I almost threw up, I almost cried."
Shortly after Faritor, another contestant, Yusuf Nader, an Egyptian post-graduate in biorobotics in Berlin, independently discovered the same word in the same field, with even clearer results - winning the second prize of $10.000.
Another prize of $10.000 was awarded to Casey Hendmer, who was the first to discover ink and more letters in an unopened scroll.
His work served as the basis for Luka Faritor's artificial intelligence program.
The discovery of the first word on an ancient scroll from Herculaneum is considered the introduction of a revolution in the field of paperwork.
"This has been the dream of many people since the scrolls were first discovered in the 1750s," wrote Nat Friedman, the initiator and sponsor of the Vesuvius Challenge, on the X social network.
"It is also the result of 20 years of work by Dr. Brent Sills and his team from EdjusLab, whose years and years of dedicated work made this finish possible," he added.
At a press conference announcing the first word ever deciphered from the ancient scrolls, Professor Brenes Sills said the scrolls were "something people said could never be read because it was too difficult to get the text out of them."
"And yet that's exactly what we're talking about today," he added.
The researchers say that the biggest discovery is that with the help of modern technology, anyone, anywhere will be able to read the scrolls.
The Vesuvius Challenge still offers a top prize of $700.000 to the first team to read four paragraphs of text from two intact scrolls.
Scientists hope to discover more valuable information about how we lived thousands of years ago.
The world was stunned to see magnificent public buildings and lavish villas when the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum were discovered in the 18th century.
The remains of people who were either hiding from the eruption or trying to escape from it were also preserved - they were even found baking bread still in the oven.
What else could these ancient scrolls tell us?
Watch the video: A secret passage in the Great Pyramid of Giza discovered
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