As an alternative, the Vesuvius Challenge took high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls and offered one million dollars, among several prizes to encourage research on them.
The prize-winning trio included Joseph Nader, a PhD student in Berlin, Luke Ferriter, a student and SpaceX trainee from Nebraska, and Swiss robotics student Julian Schilliger.
The group used AI to help distinguish ink from papyrus and decipher blurred and nearly unreadable Greek letters through pattern recognition.
“Some of these texts may completely rewrite the history of major periods of the ancient world,” Robert Fowler, a classicist and president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine.
The challenge required researchers to decipher four fragments of at least 140 characters each, of which at least 85 percent of the characters were recoverable.
