A closed carbonised papyrus scroll from Herculaneum being scanned. The Vesuvius Challenge is an unparalleled competition in the field of classical studies, with the potential to pave the way for something akin to a second Renaissance. Its objective is to use artificial intelligence (AI) to virtually unroll hundreds of closed papyrus scrolls, containing ancient literature that has not been seen for 2,000 years. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, it buried various cities at the Gulf of Naples under massive volcanic material – including Herculaneum, located near Pompeii. In the 18th century, an exceptionally luxurious Roman villa was excavated there, close to the ancient city walls and shoreline. The villa's marvellous wall paintings, mosaics, busts and statues had been conserved by the ashes.

Scientists have used AI to unravel a 2,000-year-old mystery, deciphering an unopened scroll charred to ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. When Mt Vesuvius erupted in 79CE, the nearby town of Herculaneum was entombed in a flood of volcanic mud and ash, taking with it a library of over 1,800 ancient manuscripts. While it was feared that the knowledge of the scrolls would be forever lost, two computer scientists have just won $50,000 (£41,168) for revealing the first word from the carbonized scrolls. Luke Farritor from Nebraska and Youssef Nader from Berlin independently revealed the same word hidden within the heart of the sealed manuscript - 'πορφύραc' - meaning purple dye or clothes of purple. The discovery was announced by Professor Brent Seales, a computer scientist from the University of Kentucky, who launched the so-called Vesuvius Challenge in March, offering cash prizes for anyone who could read the manuscripts.

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.

The scientific world is developing a knack for reading texts without opening them. Researchers in Israel and the US have conducted the first "virtual unwrapping" of a heavily damaged scroll, the En-Gedi scroll, to read its contents without destroying what's left. The team used a high-resolution volumetric scan to create a 3D model of the scroll, looked for bright pixels in the model (a sign of where the ink would be) and virtually flattened the scroll to make text segments readable. The process is slow, as you have to piece together segments and reconstruct lines of text that have been lost to the ages. However, the results were worth it in this case: the researchers discovered that this is the earliest known copy of a Pentateuchal book from the Bible (Leviticus) to be found in a Holy Ark, dating back "at least" 1,500 years.