An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time

I am on the vesuvius challenge team that did the segmentation, unwrapping, and ink detection, so feel free to ask any questions.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Where is the direct English translation? I don't care about anything else.

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.