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| DATE | 2024-02-11 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Tech and archeology
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Nat Friedman alert (Xiamian)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/vesuvius-challenge-ai-herculaneum-scrolls-b27c2e30?mod=tech_lead_pos4
he World’s Smartest Young Minds Just Cracked a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery
Ben Cohen
10–13 minutes
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Last year, when he was a college student majoring in computer science
and interning at SpaceX, Luke Farritor began working on a problem that
captivated many of the world’s brightest young minds, one that could
only be solved with machine learning, computer vision and the latest
advances in artificial intelligence.
He wanted to read a bunch of 2,000-year-old papyrus scrolls.
These scrolls known by the seductive name of the Herculaneum papyri have
been unreadable since Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. and they were
buried under mud and ashes at a private villa near Pompeii. For
centuries, they were lost to history. Even when they were discovered in
the 1700s, the carbonized scrolls were too fragile to handle.
Then tech investors, billionaire quants and Silicon Valley luminaries
decided to fund the Vesuvius Challenge, a $1 million competition with
the crazy goal of using AI to recover a few passages from the
Herculaneum papyri. And it actually worked! This week, the Vesuvius
Challenge trumpeted a monumental technological breakthrough: The scrolls
have finally been opened.
The winning team consisted of three students, including Farritor, 22,
who investigated ruins of antiquity from his University of Nebraska dorm
room. They didn’t know each other before the Vesuvius Challenge. They
still haven’t met in person. But they built on each other’s work and did
something together they couldn’t have done alone—something that many
thought couldn’t be done at all.
And by looking so far into the past, they’re offering a peek into the
future.
“I think this promises a very exciting future where seemingly impossible
ideas will become possible,” said another member of the winning team,
Youssef Nader, a 27-year-old machine-learning Ph.D. student at Freie
University in Berlin.
I mentioned that to Richard Janko, a professor of classical studies at
the University of Michigan, who’s been dreaming of reading these scrolls
since before the Vesuvius Challenge winners were born. He told me that
it didn’t just seem impossible. It really was impossible. “We couldn’t
have done this without the tech guys,” Janko said.
Thinking about the Roman Empire
To understand what they did and how they did it, it helps to know the
history of the Herculaneum papyri. Or at least the recent history. The
quest to unroll them began not with a volcanic eruption two millennia
but two decades ago, when University of Kentucky computer scientist
Brent Seales devised a method of applying modern technology to crack an
old mystery.
The remains of the Herculaneum papyri don’t look like anything left
behind by ancient civilizations that might contain the secrets of
science, math and philosophy. They look more like something your dog
left behind on the rug. The burnt scrolls were in such rough shape that
they couldn’t be physically unraveled, which made them a perfect target
for Seales’s pioneering research.
The process of virtually unwrapping the Herculaneum papyri involved
three steps: scanning, segmentation and searching for ink. It sounds
basic, but it’s really bonkers. “It seems like a magic trick,” Seales
said. First the scrolls had to be scanned at high resolution by a
particle accelerator. Then the sheets had to be identified, separated
and digitally flattened. Only then could the machine-learning models
find ink. Stephen Parsons, a graduate student in Seales’s lab, published
a dissertation last year showing this was theoretically possible. But it
was unclear how long it would take to convert theory into reality until
Seales received an email from Nat Friedman.
“I ignored it,” he told me, “because I didn’t know who he is.”
Friedman is a tech investor, entrepreneur and the former chief executive
of GitHub. In the early days of the pandemic, something odd happened to
him: He fell down a rabbit hole into ancient Rome. When he learned about
the existence of the Herculaneum scrolls, he became obsessed. When he
learned about Seales’s effort to read them, he wanted to help. He wasn’t
sure how. But once the professor responded to his email, Friedman
pitched him on an unconventional idea: a contest.
One of the many benefits of contests is that they are magnets for
talent—especially young talent like Farritor. A brilliant college
student with interests in both computer science and archaeology, he was
exactly the sort of person with the skills to help. But nobody would
have ever asked him.
“This kind of approach to research is grossly underrated,” Farritor
said. “I think there should be tons of prizes like this for so many
different fields.”
Farritor was an intern at SpaceX last year, listening to Friedman on a
podcast while driving to the company’s Starbase facility in Boca Chica,
Texas, when he heard about the Vesuvius Challenge. It wasn’t just one
thing about the contest that he found alluring. It was everything: the
money, the historical significance, the chance to impress his heroes,
the idea of bringing tech to new (and old) fields and the sheer
adventure of it all. “I also just enjoy working on projects,” Farritor
told me. “I can scroll through TikTok, or I can work on this.”
Nader, who is from Egypt, was similarly compelled when he read about the
contest on Kaggle, which hosts data-science competitions, though for
slightly different reasons. “The word papyrus struck a chord for me as
an Egyptian,” he told me. Soon, he was focusing more on the Vesuvius
Challenge than his Ph.D. work. “It was like my secret double life,” he
said. Before long, he was only thinking about the Roman Empire.
Many of the 3,000-plus tech nerds in the Vesuvius Challenge were
students like Farritor, Nader and Julian Schilliger, the third member of
the winning team, a 28-year-old robotics graduate student at ETH Zurich
in Switzerland. Young people are usually the ones with the time,
creativity, raw ambition and curiosity to experiment with new
technology. And today’s young people are the ones who will show us how
to be smarter about AI.
“In the sciences, it’s the youngest people who are the smartest,” Janko
told me. “In the humanities, it’s the oldest.”
Start making sense
The mission to bring ancient Rome back to life began on the Ides of
March last year.
The contest was started by Seales, Friedman and his investing partner
Daniel Gross, and they crowdsourced the funds to dangle a tantalizing
grand prize: $700,000 for the first team to recover four legible
passages of 140 characters each by the end of 2023. They knew the
Vesuvius Challenge would attract a legion of AI geeks. What they didn’t
know was how much progress money could buy.
When he thought about how to structure the contest, Friedman made a
crucial discovery of his own: He believed it would be essential to blend
competition with cooperation. That’s why the Vesuvius Challenge offered
another $300,000 in prizes that rewarded milestones along the way—an
incentive for participants to share their progress and code. “If it was
just a competition, you’d have teams or individuals work on it and make
a little progress, but then give up because it’s way too much work to do
for a small chance of success,” Friedman said. He wanted to make that
small chance of success much bigger.
For example, when one contestant with a Ph.D. in theoretical
astrophysics looked at the scans for a really, really long time, a
technique he called “persistent direct visual inspection,” he managed to
detect traces of crackled ink hidden in the scrolls. It was a momentous
finding that merited a $10,000 progress prize—and Farritor’s attention.
When he read about the discovery of “crackle pattern” in the shape of
Greek letters, Farritor trained his machine-learning model on those
characters to look for more of them, since it would take computer vision
to recognize the ink strokes a human eye could never see. One
contribution had inspired another. This was exactly how the Vesuvius
Challenge was supposed to work.
Last summer, Farritor moved back to Nebraska, where he lived with five
computers in his dorm room, and his AI model spotted a string of 10
letters that spelled porphyras—purple.
This made Farritor the first person in two millennia to read a word in
the unopened Herculaneum papyri. It also made him $40,000.
He used some of the money to splurge on a gift for his brother: a
vintage poster for the Talking Heads concert movie “Stop Making Sense.”
With his share of the $700,000 grand prize, he says he’d like to take
his mother to Paris. He’s also thinking about building an autonomous
boat to circumnavigate the globe.
The future of the past
Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Nader was plugging away at his own
AI models, which earned him a $10,000 progress prize. He invested in a
new computer and the access to cloud-computing power he would need to
win the grand prize.
By then, there was an active Vesuvius Challenge community on Discord.
Now that the seemingly impossible was becoming probable, Farritor and
Nader made the strategic decision to join forces. Instead of competing
against each other, they would collaborate with each other. In the days
before the Dec. 31 deadline, they also teamed up with Schilliger, whose
impressive work extracting sheets from the scrolls fed their models with
more data. Their entry stood out among the 18 submissions that the
Vesuvius Challenge organizers sent Janko and other papyrologists to
review—and reveal what people had been waiting thousands of years to
see.
So what do the scrolls actually say?
Well, as it turns out, they’re sort of amazing. Likely written by the
Epicurean philosopher Philodemus, they discuss topics we’re still
talking about today: music, food, pleasure. Basically, how to lead a
happy life.
“It’s just incredible to have hit upon something that we can understand
and has some universality to it,” Friedman told me. “You can almost see
someone writing this on Substack right now.”
Everyone involved with the Vesuvius Challenge is already thinking about
what they might do next and how they can apply the lessons of this
contest to other seemingly impossible tasks.
But knowing a little bit about the papyri also made them want to know a
lot more. The first year of the Vesuvius Challenge unearthed 5% of one
scroll. There’s another six-figure prize attached to this year’s goal:
recovering 90% of the four scrolls that have been scanned. And they hope
that’s just the start. Classics scholars also believe there is a bigger
library of hidden treasures waiting to be excavated from Herculaneum
that could keep them busy for the next 2,000 years.
Farritor plans to keep working on the scrolls, too. But he might not
have as much time: He just dropped out of school to work for Friedman.
His first day on the job was Monday—the day he won the Vesuvius
Challenge.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen-at-wsj.com
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