How students teamed up to decode 2,000-year-old texts using AI

What began as a challenge to decipher texts buried for centuries under the ash of Mount Vesuvius quickly turned into a historic breakthrough using AI and GitHub tools. Three students –Youssef Nader, Luke FarritorAnd Julian Schilliger– collaborated across time zones and borders to unlock the secrets of 2,000-year-old scrolls, ultimately winning the Vesuvius Challenge and winning $700,000 in prizes. Their work demonstrates the powerful intersection between AI, open source collaboration, and the drive to solve puzzles that have puzzled scientists for centuries.

About the challenge

In March 2023, a group of leading technologists developed this Vesuvius Challengea competition to decipher the Herculaneum papyri who were buried after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius 2,000 years ago. Due to carbonization, these scrolls cannot be opened without them disintegrating. So how can we access these ancient texts?

In one Interview with NPRSimon Scott of Brent Seals, computer science professor at the University of Kentucky, talked about virtual scroll unwrapping and the development of technology in this area. This technology has been around for decades, but in 2015 a breakthrough occurred that led to the reading of a scroll in the Dead Sea Scrolls collection. Scientists used tomography and X-rays and had success with the Dead Sea Scrolls, but had no success when it came to Herculaneum texts. “Not only was it difficult to unpack these scrolls virtually, but the ancient ink was not easily visible in the scans we created, and we needed an AI-based approach to be able to see this ink,” says Seals said. After scientists captured these scans of the Herculaneum papyri, technologists from around the world set out to analyze them.

Watch Brent Seals talk about the process of virtually unpacking to recover part of the text about Herculaneum and how this led to the creation of the Vesuvius Challenge.

Meet the students

With hundreds of engineers working on this around the world, it’s no surprise that the winning group met and collaborated entirely online. Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor and Julian Schilliger mastered the challenge together discord servers and chatted about the other projects they had been working on as part of the Vesuvius Challenge. Luke won Price for first letters and turned to Youssef when he was named runner-up. Although we weren’t able to sit down with Luke, in this interview with his school, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, he described the process of realizing he had found the first letter.

Click here to hear Luke explain his experience and the moment he realized he had discovered the first letters in the Vesuvius Challenge.

At this point in the competition, Luke was working on segmentation and Youssef had built AI detection models. Shortly thereafter, the two teamed up with Julian, who achieved a breakthrough by automating segmentation in extensive collaboration with GitHub Copilot.

“There are so many benefits to using GitHub as a student, from a free GitHub Pro account to using GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code,” Julian said. “For the Vesuvius challenge I had to write a pipeline most of the time. I would write a section of code that I needed to use to achieve the next goal, and if I knew what I wanted to write, I could use the autocomplete tool to write faster. That was a huge time saver!”

We also caught up with Youssef, who shared insights into his experiences.

“We worked in different time zones, so we sometimes had to intentionally overlap, which resulted in some very late nights and early mornings,” he said. “It was worth it because the team not only won the challenge, but was also able to create special memories together. I remember Julian sent me an exciting message about a night before submission that about 1600 cm^2 of the scrolls would be segmented by his software. We spent most of the night searching for the title of the scroll.”

Youssef remembered the morning when everything fell into place. “I had almost given up hope. I had tried so many different things. In the morning I conducted one final experiment and to my surprise it worked. There were some parts that made me feel in some way connected to this 2000 year old scroll. It was necessary to trace the writing of this ancient writer on the scroll and use ink deposits to find intelligent ways to figure out what letter it would be.”

These three students realized the dream of every papyrologist from 1754 AD. Papyrologist Gianluca Del Mastro recalled meeting Luke in Kentucky for the First Letter Prize. “I saw this young student in front of me. It surprised me as I was expecting someone older. I realized that we have entered a new world of information technology, where it is possible to make new discoveries even at a young age.”

The team invites everyone to take a look Your winning team’s code on GitHub. I have been using GitHub for many years and use the tools in Student developer packageYoussef and Julian felt this was the perfect place to share their team’s insights. “The challenge from the start was to promote collaboration even in the face of competition. Putting our code on GitHub was the only thing that made sense so the community could continue to build and have easy access to collaborate and drive progress,” said Youssef.

After the challenge

Dr. Del Mastro had the opportunity to meet two of the winning teammates after his team sponsored their flight to Naples, Italy, to see the scrolls in person. It was the first time that Youssef and Julian were able to meet in person. “It was surreal to meet in person after spending so much time collaborating over the internet,” Youssef shared. While in Naples, the two attended a conference where they were able to meet some of the professors behind the evaluation of their work. Youssef happily reports that he, Julian and Luke are still in touch and hopes that they can all work on a project together in the future.

The experience changed my life in many ways. Not only did the three winners help uncover part of the past, but one of them also found his future. Julian shared that through the challenge he met so many wonderful teachers and mentors who opened his eyes to the work that needs to be done at the intersection of code and history. After overcoming the challenge, he accepted a full-time position with the Vesuvius Project, where he spends his time deciphering the scrolls and uncovering new information about the ancient past.

Julian said: “Youssef, Luke and I won this grand prize, but this is only a small part of the ongoing effort to decipher the scrolls. A lot of people were working on this before 2023 and there’s still a lot of work to be done in 2024.” If you’re interested in getting involved, take a look discord.

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