The World’s Smartest Young Minds Just Cracked a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery

livemint.com:

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.