Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines

The first sponge diver to resurface was panicked by what he'd seen. There were too many men and horses for him to count, presumably they'd been doomed in a shipwreck. The bodies were statues, part of an astounding collection of ancient works, a blockbuster archaeological find. Over the course of the next 10 months, divers recovered scores of marble and bronze artifacts from the Antikythera shipwreck, which today remains the largest ancient ship ever found. Nearly all of the ship's equipment was massively oversized--including tremendous hull planks more than 4 inches thick. The shipwreck made headlines around the world--in part because it yielded several rare bronze statues, which scholars believed might be the work of Lysippos or Praxiteles, two of the most important Classical Greek sculptors of the fourth century B.C.E., according to newspaper reports at the time.