Student Uses AI To Decipher Ancient Greco-Roman Scroll, Wins $40K Prize

Press2ToContinue writes: 'An undergraduate student used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 and AI to decipher a word in one of the Herculaneum scrolls to win a $40,000 prize (via Nvidia),' reports Tom's Hardware. 'Herculaneum was covered in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls are one of the site's most famous artifacts.'

The scrolls have been notoriously hard to decipher because they cannot be unwrapped because they're basically like a stick of charcoal. Instead they must be virtually unwrapped, using a 3D scan dataset of it in its wrapped state. So, the task is to find the tiny bits of ink, assemble them into letters, and try to decipher what they say. Machine learning is now becoming the key that picks the lock. A student deciphered one of the words using a GTX 1070, which doesn't even have any tensor cores. Imagine what he could do with a RTX 4090!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.