Manuscripts from Herculaneum. The students made a breakthrough

Herculaneum was destroyed along with Pompeii before The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. In the middle of the eighteenth century, during archaeological work in a villa in the first town, scholars discovered papyrus manuscripts from the library of Consul Lucius Calpurnius Piso Sissoninus.

Only a few hundred of them have been deciphered. Part of it was damaged during the unfolding. The rest remains unassembled. So an initiative was created Vesuvius challengea competition involving development Ways to read the contents of exhibits. The organizers have reserved a swimming pool for the participants Million dollars in prizes.

The students are the authors of this hack

In early February it was reported 700 thousand dollars went into the hands of three studentsWho read it? 15 columns of text One of the manuscripts. They did this using Advanced technologies and artificial intelligence. This amounted to approx Five percent The entire content written on the papyrus.

See: Italy. An almost hundred-year-old Sicilian defended his master's thesis in philosophy

According to scientists, the developed method may be a breakthrough not only for… manuscripts From Herculaneum, But the other papyri are in such a condition that they cannot be unfolded.

“It's very satisfying to know that these things exist and that we now have a mechanism to read them, and that reading them will create a whole field of study and scholarship of the classics,” said Brent Sales, a professor of computer science at UCLA. University of Kentucky and co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge, as reported by CNN.

Sayings of the Greek philosopher

The trio that dominated the competition with their solution consisted of American Luke Faritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska, Egyptian Youssef Nader, a graduate of biorobotics at Freie University in Berlin, and Swiss Julian Schleger, a robotics student. At ETH Zurich.

The effects of the students' work were presented Papyrus scholars from England, France and Italy, who verified and evaluated the decoded text. It turns out that the manuscript contains a letter by the Greek philosopher Philodemus, who may have been a resident of the library from which the papyri came.

See: Italy. He wanted to take a selfie on Vesuvius. He fell into the hole

The author discussed the topic of “pleasure.” “Just as in the case of food, we do not immediately believe that rare things are certainly more pleasant than those that are abundant,” is said to be the first sentence decoded.

The organizers of the competition confirm that:Winners of the Vesuvius Challenge “Able to obtain an original text but not destroy the manuscript.”

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