21-Year-Old Wins $40K After Using AI to Read First Word on 2,000-Year-Old Papyrus Scroll

The University of Nebraska undergraduate student just made history after using AI to read a word from an ancient papyrus scroll

A University of Nebraska undergraduate student has made history by using AI to read a section of a 2,000-year-old scroll.

Luke Farritor was the first person to decipher a word from ancient scrolls as part of the Vesuvius Challenge. The Vesuvius Challenge is a competition for people to use modern technology to decipher the secrets of ancient rolled-up papyrus scrolls that hail from an ancient library in the Roman city of Herculaneum and, as a result of Mount Vesuvius erupting in 79 CE, were fossilized into carbon and are incredibly fragile.

On Thursday, the Vesuvius Challenge announced during a press conference that the 21-year-old computer-science major had won the “First Letters” prize of $40,000, after successfully deciphering and reading more than 10 characters in a 4-square-centimeter area of a scroll.

The competition winner, who is a student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, was inspired by the previous work of another contestant, Casey Handmer, which followed on from research by Professor Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky’s EduceLab, according to the Vesuvius Challenge website. Per Nature, Farritor developed a machine-learning algorithm which he used to eventually detect a number of letters on the scroll. The word he discovered was "Porphyras" which means "purple" the Vesuvius Challenge website said.

Farritor became the first contestant to submit the required number of legible letters in the competition. During the press conference, he shared his excitement about the initial moment of spotting the letters.

"I saw these letters and I just completely freaked out," Farritor said. "I freaked out, almost fell over, almost cried."

“I took a screenshot. I immediately sent it to JP Posma, who sent it to everyone else. I sent it to my family. My mom called and she was like, ‘Hey, like this is the first thing that you sent me that really looks like the letters. This is really cool,’ ” he explained.

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Farritor first made the discovery late one night and said he knew he needed to “improve” the photo. “I was like… let’s keep going until it got to something that looks a lot like the image you’re seeing today,” he said.

Since Farritor reported his findings first, he was awarded the main prize, however, the second-place winner, Youssef Nader, also discovered the word in the same area and was awarded the $10,000 cash prize.

Farritor's use of AI to read letters from the Herculaneum scrolls came as they were considered too fragile to unfurl and, according to the Vesuvius Challenge website, they would "turn to dust" if handled improperly.

Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples and member of the academic committee that reviewed Farritor's findings, said, per Nature, that the objects are “crazy” and “all crumpled and crushed.”

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The fragility of the scrolls is a result of them dating back to 79 CE, after Mount Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Pompeii, Italy. The somma-stratovolcano caused mudslides to form that left the city of Herculaneum covered in over 65 feet of volcanic ash, per Nature.

As a result of the volcanic eruption, the heat transformed hundreds of papyrus scrolls from a library in Herculaneum into fossilized chunks of carbon, according to the outlet. For the next 1,700 years, the scrolls were buried in mud, until 1752 when they were finally excavated.

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Nicolardi said, per Nature, that Farritor's discovery “was such a dream." She added, “I can actually see something from the inside of a scroll.”

She also said she believes that soon papyrologists will be able to read the document and it will jumpstart a “great revolution.”

Thea Sommerschield, a historian of ancient Greece and Rome at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, explained, per Nature, that this discovery could “revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history and literature.

While Farritor was able to decode this, there are still several unread scrolls. As a result, the Vesuvius Challenge has challenged researchers to read four passages in the two scanned scrolls in order to win the $700,000 grand prize.

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