What is the Vesuvius Challenge?

The Vesuvius Challenge, as described by Nat Friedman during a discussion with Dwarkesh Patel, revolves around an exciting and significant initiative aimed at deciphering ancient scrolls from Herculaneum, a town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius around 2000 years ago. These scrolls, previously inaccessible due to their delicate condition following the eruption, could potentially double our existing knowledge from antiquity once they are read.

The challenge involves overcoming technical obstacles to read these scrolls, which have been buried under a thick layer of ash and mud. Key issues include the ink's poor absorbability to X-ray and the scrolls' distorted and tightly-wound state, necessitating the development of new techniques for identifying the ink and segmenting the scrolls for digital reading. Recent advances have seen the use of convolutional neural networks to recognize ink inside X-ray scans, demonstrating significant progress in the efforts to digitally decode these ancient texts 1 2.