Contest launched to decipher Herculaneum scrolls using 3D X-ray software

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa. Now, researchers are launching a global contest to read the charred papyri after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence programme can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the fragile, unrolled documents. Scientists led by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, were able to read the ink on surface and hidden layers of scrolls by training a machine-learning algorithm to spot subtle differences in the papyrus structure captured by the X-ray images. "We've shown how to read the ink of Herculaneum. That gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80% of the entire collection," said Seales.