from Hacker News

First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

by goodcanadian on 2/5/25, 5:12 PM with 81 comments

• by mmooss on 2/9/25, 3:37 AM

  How do we know the AI output is accurate? What observable evidence is there? From the article:

  > Inside this huge machine, which is called a synchrotron, electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light to produce a powerful X-ray beam that can probe the scroll without damaging it. ...

  > The scan is used to create a 3D reconstruction, then the layers inside the scroll - it contains about 10m of papyrus - have to be identified. ...

  > After that artificial intelligence is used to detect the ink. It's easier said than done - both the papyrus and ink are made from carbon and they're almost indistinguishable from each other.

  > So the AI hunts for the tiniest signals that ink might be there, then this ink is painted on digitally, bringing the letters to light.

• by dang on 2/8/25, 9:04 PM

  Recent and related:

  News from Scroll 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42955356 - Feb 2025 (3 comments)

• by userbinator on 2/9/25, 3:08 AM

  In the future, perhaps we may see "first glimpse inside burnt floppy disk after 2k years"?

• by baruz on 2/9/25, 3:52 AM

  They said that the work was a Greek Epicurean work, but described it as finding fulfillment in the pleasures of life. The Greek Epicureans were of the opinion that avoiding pain and suffering was the object of ethical philosophy, which is not the same thing, at all.

• by declan_roberts on 2/9/25, 3:46 PM

  Isn't reading a wrapped scroll with AI what one or the DOGE guys is famous for? Is this his same technology or something different?

• by dmolony on 2/9/25, 2:01 AM

  Luckily they explained what papyrus is. The BBC is now doing ELI5.

• by generalizations on 2/8/25, 8:31 PM

  > The document, which looks like a lump of charcoal, was charred by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and is too fragile to ever be physically opened.

  > But now scientists have used a combination of X-ray imaging and artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl it, revealing rows and columns of text.

  "scientists"

  They talked to the head of the vesuvius challenge, which is the actual project that figured out how to read the scrolls, the head of the library that holds the scrolls, and the guy who runs the xray machine. But the people who solved this weren't scientists. They were largely college kids.

  This has a lot more interesting detail. https://scrollprize.org/