On a Saturday night in late August, Luke Farritor, a 21-year old computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, was on his way home from a party at a friend's house in Omaha when he saw something on his phone that he says almost caused him to break into tears and fall to the floor. Farritor had spent the last six months poring over 3D X-rays of ancient scrolls, often for more than 40 hours per week, all alongside internships and his studies. While he was at the party he had received a message informing him that new segments of scanned and virtually flattened scrolls had just been uploaded. With the music blaring around him, he logged onto his PC remotely to set the AI model that he'd built to detect ink from previous scroll scans to work on the new segments and rejoined the party. After driving home, on the walk back to his college dorm from the parking lot, Farritor remembered the scrolls and checked his phone.

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.