verditelabs

I can't hear you over all this cool stuff I'm discovering

We will gladly take your money. There's a link on our homepage to give us money. We list a lot of sponsors and appreciate all that we have been given. Most of that was given in 2023 and 2024 and most/all of it had been spent. As far as I am aware we now rely solely on our internal funding from our founding sponsors. We are a separate entity from both U of K and the University of Naples and receive zero dollars from either of them, though their faculty and staff work closely with us in our goal of reading the scrolls.

I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.

Various physical methods of unrolling, including the use of chemicals, have been attempted over the past 275 years, but none have proven to not destroy the scrolls. As far as I know no physical unrolling has been attempted since the 80s and I believe that now only non destructive methods are being employed. For fragments and already shattered and opened, unrolled scrolls a variety of imaging techniques exist and are still being improved upon by teams and research groups we are not associated with. For unrolled scrolls, I believe at this point no one will ever attempt physical unwrapping ever again.

Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab lab at U of K, and U of K as a whole. The purpose of the scrollprize website is not to showcase the 25 years of research leading up to the Vesuivus Challenge. It's to showcase what the Vesuivus Challenge is doing.

Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.

5/7 trolling; not bad

We scan the full scrolls a 2.4 micron and scan portions of them at up to .5 micron. This is 1000x to 4000x higher resolution than your standard medical CT scanner, so that requires a lot more power to get readings at such high resolution. There are other properties that make large synchrotrons more amenable to our task but I am not an xray technician so am not qualified to speak to most of them.

Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.

Not yet, as far as I am aware. Digging progress is decided by the Italian government at multiple levels and would be a many year long thing. We have our hands full for the forseeable future with the 30 or so scrolls we've already scanned. We're getting more and more efficient on the scanning and automation fronts, though, and are hoping that we can get our hands on the other 300 or so intact scrolls, but that in and of itself is a multi year long project that will require more money and time. As I've mentioned in a different comment, scanning is _not cheap_ and we pay for it ourselves from our own funding and donations in order to release the data for free with permissive licensing. We hope that we can improve our processes to be able to work with cheaper, lower resolution CT methods, but right now we are focused on extracting as much as possible from the best scan source in the world. Productization of cheaper scanning methods is a secondary to tertiary priority at the moment.

The core challenge team is focused on the technology side to provide the images of ink to our team of papyrologists and they do the transcription, translation, reading, and scholarship.

This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .

You'd probably like the Deep Past Challenge then: https://www.deeppast.org/

We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.

The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.

Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.

A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.

We are a core team of about 10 researchers and developers working full time on work that applies to all of the scrolls. We also ahve 4 full time annotators that tend to work on one scroll at a time. The amount of time spent on any given scroll varies with how difficult and large it is.

There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.

I wrote this as an answer to a different question but I think it applies to what you're asking as well

Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.

Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.

One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?

It has gotten harder, unfortunately. One of the barriers to entry is simply the massive amounts of data; not everyone can set aside $100s worth of HDD or SSD space to play around. That said I have done a lot of work to dramatically reduce the amount of storage and bandwidth needed.

We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.

Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.

I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.

For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.

Can't stop Sean from segmenting

IIRC 99% of all of the existing scrolls are still in Italy's possession. I think the breakdown is something like ~350 are mostly in tact, another ~1000 are damaged but still "scroll like", and the remaining hundreds are shattered fragments.

Some images on that page, specifically the "alpha composite" and "combined alpha" images, are a pretty simple PBR (if it's even that complex; it's just a composite rendering over a 3d array to a 2d image) rendering with no ML based ink detection in the input.

That have been dug up? I think 600 or so still exist. Perhaps about 2000 or so have ever been excavated. We have scanned about 30 of them. Still underground? I've seen various counts. Maybe more than 10000?

We stand on the shoulders of those that came before us. People have been trying to unroll and read the scrolls for 250 some odd years now. Had they not laid the groundwork for all that time we wouldn't be making the progress we are now.

In March I went to Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. I had to swap out the scrolls on the xray pedestal. Scrolls that were presented as a diplomatic gift to Napoleon and Josephine by King Ferdinand. France has 2 of the 6 that they were given still in tact. I had to handle both of them. I have never felt more stressed in my life and have never and will probably never again handle such a priceless artifact.

I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished

Beats me; I am a programmer, not a classicist.

Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

Other members that were on the team before me had already proved it out before I came along so I knew it was possible. The cool thing for me though was specifically doing some physicically based rendering techniques. How well these work varies greatly, but on a few segments in one scroll they work extremely well. I whipped up some simple code to composite layers, did up a render, and without any ML at all was looking at multiple rows of text that no one had read for 2000 years. That was neat.

The ground truth comes from manual work. The scrolls can be unwrapped virtually, manually, through extensive pointing and clicking by a human on the boundaries of the scroll. This, in and of itself, is not particularly hard in sections of the scroll that are preserved well, but is extremely tedious and slow and error prone. We have a team of annotators who do manual annotation and refinement through custom software we've written, mostly improving on automatically generated segmentations and unwrappings.

Once you have some unwrapped papyrus, you can render it to an image and look for ink. Ink leaves a certain texture that can be identified by the naked eye and labeled. Between these two processes you get the segmentation and ink detection ground truth. Segments can be flattened virtually through existing software and algorithms.

That varies greatly on the state of preservation of the scroll. For some of the scrolls we can recover entire columns of text. But this is a best case. Plenty of scrolls, or portions of scrolls, are extremely damaged and warped to where our current methods cannot unroll them through any combination of automated and human driven unrolling. Both of these still have massive headroom for improvement, but achieving that headroom is hard as the preservation gets worse.

To give numbers, for ideal portions of scrolls, we can read 100% of the characters. In nonideal portions of scrolls, we can read 0% of the characters. It's not really possible to quantify how much we could theoretically recover of that 0% through better methods, and how much is truly destroyed.

Yes. Most of the ink we have come across is carbon based. This leaves a certain texture on the scrolls that is recoverable and viewable with fairly basic physically based rendering, though how much ink is recoverable varies greatly from one character to the next. I don't have links handy but we just published updates to our data viewer page on our website. Pherc.Paris.4 I believe has the best overlay of ink.

A lot of labeled data is available on our ftp server which has public access

BS in CS from a big state school in the USA. I have a hobby interest in history. I learned about the challenge on YouTube. Got involved contributing because I needed money. Then they put out a job posting. I applied, interviewed, and was hired.

We - the core challenge team anyway - get no money from any government. We paid for the beam time from our donations and internal funding.

We've been trying to automate since the beginning. A lot of it is automated but it's mostly the easier and less damaged parts of the scrolls. Scanning takes a few days for the biggest scrolls but the amount of human refinement is still a multi month process.

The beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab getting their samples ready. It's a well oiled machine and they've got customers.

30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.

The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.

The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap

I am not on the research team, rather on the production side of things, so my knowledge on that is pretty limited. I think one of the main takeaways from a lot of the research, though, on both the segmentation side and the ink detection side, is that it's a lot less about what models and techniques and such you use, but how good your training data is. Gathering ground truth is hard, and if you don't have a lot of good ground truth, it doesn't matter if your code is perfect, you'll never get results.