Student uses AI to decipher word in ancient scroll from Herculaneum

The Greek word for "purple" has been extracted from a Herculaneum scroll Almost 2000 years after they were buried by the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, scrolls from a library in the ancient Roman town of Herculaneum have begun to reveal their secrets. The tightly wrapped papyrus scrolls were charred in the disaster, which also destroyed the nearby town of Pompeii. But by studying 3D X-ray scans of the scrolls, researchers have deciphered a word on one of them: "porphyras", meaning "purple". The breakthrough came from Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His success involved training an AI to identify nearly invisible ink-like patterns in the 3D scans. "Seeing Luke's first word was a shock," says Michael McOsker at the University College London in the UK, who was not involved in the discovery.