The Vesuvius Challenge, initiated ten months ago to tackle the enigma of the Herculaneum Papyri, has achieved a historic breakthrough, as announced by Nat Friedman. The project successfully decoded a portion of the ancient scrolls that were preserved in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 AD.
Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of scrolls that were flash-fried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
Today we are overjoyed to announce that our crazy project has succeeded. After 2000… pic.twitter.com/fihs9ADb48— Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) February 5, 2024
The winning team, composed of Youssef Nader, Luke Farrito, and Julian Schilliger, secured the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000. Youssef is an Egyptian PhD student in Berlin who successfully read a few columns of text back in October, earning him the second-place First Letters Prize.
Luke is a 21-year-old college student and SpaceX intern from Nebraska. Julian is a Swiss robotics student at ETH Zürich, who won three Segmentation Tooling prizes for his incredible work on the Volume Cartographer.
The deciphered text, originating from the first scroll, sheds light on the musings of the probable author, Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. Philodemus discusses various subjects, including music, food, and the pursuit of life’s pleasures. Notably, the text concludes with subtle criticism directed at unnamed ideological adversaries, believed to be the stoics, who are accused of having little to say about pleasure.
The winning solution utilised a final canonical model based on the timesformer small architecture featuring a divided space-time attention mechanism. This innovative approach allowed for a comprehensive understanding of the ancient text, marking a significant breakthrough in the quest to unveil the mysteries of the past.
The dataset underwent meticulous expansion and cleaning, involving approximately 15 rounds of refinement to enhance the accuracy of the labels. It also consisted of 2 other architectures, Resnet3D-101 with pretrained weights, I3D with non-local block and maxpooling.
The Vesuvius Challenge is set to continue in 2024. The objective now is to progress from decoding isolated passages to reading entire scrolls. To spur further advancements, a new $100,000 grand prize has been introduced for the first team capable of reading at least 90% of all four scanned scrolls.
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