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Vesuvius Challenge


 * 
   Vesuvius Challenge
 * Background
 * Overview
   * $700,000 grand prize (December 31st)
   * $100,000 Ink Detection (June 14th)
   * $45,000 Segmentation Tooling (June 14th)
   * $50,000 First Letters Prize
   * Previous Prizes
 * The Data
 * Tutorials
   * 1. Technical Overview
   * 2. Scanning
   * 3. Segmentation and Flattening
   * 4. Ink Detection
 * FAQ
 * History
 * Livestream
 * Kaggle
 * Twitter
 * Discord
 * Substack


RESURRECT AN ANCIENT LIBRARY FROM THE ASHES OF A VOLCANO.
WIN $1,000,000.

The Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning and computer vision competition to
read the Herculaneum Papyri.





79 AD
MOUNT VESUVIUS ERUPTS.

In Herculaneum, twenty meters of hot mud and ash bury an enormous villa once
owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Inside, there is a vast library of
papyrus scrolls.

The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also
preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air
decays and disappears, the library of the Villa of the Papyri waits underground,
intact.


1750 AD
A FARMER DISCOVERS THE BURIED VILLA.

While digging a well, an Italian farmworker encounters a marble pavement.
Excavations unearth beautiful statues and frescoes – and hundreds of scrolls.
Carbonized and ashen, they are extremely fragile. But the temptation to open
them is great; if read, they would more than double the corpus of literature we
have from antiquity.
Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are
painstakingly unrolled by an Italian monk over several decades, and they are
found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred
remain unopened and unreadable.


What's more, excavations were never completed, and many historians believe that
thousands more scrolls remain underground.
Imagine the secrets of Roman and Greek philosophy, science, literature,
mathematics, poetry, and politics, which are locked away in these lumps of ash,
waiting to be read!


2015 AD
DR. BRENT SEALES PIONEERS VIRTUAL UNWRAPPING.

Using X-ray tomography and computer vision, a team led by Dr. Brent Seales at
the University of Kentucky reads the En-Gedi scroll without opening it.
Discovered in the Dead Sea region of Israel, the scroll is found to contain text
from the book of Leviticus.
This achievement shows that a carbonized scroll can be digitally unrolled and
read without physically opening it. Virtual unwrapping has since emerged as a
growing field with multiple successes.
But the Herculaneum Papyri prove more challenging: unlike the denser inks used
in the En-Gedi scroll, the Herculaneum ink is carbon-based, affording no X-ray
contrast against the underlying carbon-based papyrus.


2019 AD
ENTER THE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR.

Determined to apply virtual unwrapping to the Herculaneum Papyri, Dr. Seales and
his team set out to test a new idea. Under infrared light, some detached
fragments of the papyri are readable, and it seems possible that these can be
used as ground truth data for a machine learning model that could detect
otherwise invisible ink from X-rays.

To get X-rays at the highest possible resolution, the team uses a particle
accelerator to scan two full scrolls and several fragments. At 4-8µm resolution,
with 16 bits of density data per voxel, they believe machine learning models can
pick up subtle surface patterns in the papyrus that indicate the presence of
carbon-based ink.



TODAY
YOU CAN SOLVE THIS ANCIENT PUZZLE.

In early 2023 Dr. Seales’s lab achieves a breakthrough: their machine learning
model successfully recognizes ink from the X-ray scans, demonstrating that it is
possible to apply virtual unwrapping to the Herculaneum scrolls using the scans
obtained in 2019, and even uncovering some characters in hidden layers of
papyrus.

After 275 years, the ancient puzzle of the Herculaneum Papyri has been reduced
to a software problem – one that you can help solve!


THE VESUVIUS CHALLENGE


GRAND PRIZE


$700,000

First team to read a scroll by December 31st 2023

Success requires that the Review Team can:

Read at least 4 separate passages of continuous and plausible text from the
scrolls, each at least 140 characters long

In each passage, at most 15% of the characters can be missing or illegible

Qualifying submissions reviewed by team of developers and papyrologists for
legitimacy and plausibility




INK DETECTION PRIZE


$100,000

Detect ink from X-rays by June 14th 2023

A Kaggle competition to detect ink in detached fragments of papyri

Uses ground truth data obtained from infrared imaging

Real-time leaderboard and multiple prizes




$200,000+ MORE IN PRIZES & TBA


CREATED BY


NAT FRIEDMAN


DANIEL GROSS


DR. BRENT SEALES


TEAM


VESUVIUS CHALLENGE TEAM


NAT FRIEDMAN  INSTIGATOR AND SPONSOR


DANIEL GROSS  SPONSOR


JP POSMA  PROJECT LEAD


DANIEL HAVÍŘ  MACHINE LEARNING ADVISOR


CHRIS FRANGIONE  PRIZE ADVISOR


IAN JANICKI  DESIGN ADVISOR


DR. GARRETT RYAN  CLASSICS ADVISOR


DEJAN GOTIĆ  3D ANIMATOR


JONNY HYMAN  2D ANIMATOR


EDUCELAB TEAM


DR. BRENT SEALES  PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR


STEPHEN PARSONS  PHD CANDIDATE


SETH PARKER  PHD CANDIDATE


CHRISTY CHAPMAN  RESEARCH & PARTNERSHIP MANAGER


MAMI HAYASHIDA  RESEARCH STAFF


DR. JAMES BRUSUELAS  ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS


BETH LUTIN  COLLEGE BUSINESS ANALYST


DR. ROGER MACFARLANE  PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL STUDIES


PAPYROLOGY TEAM


ROBERT FOWLER  FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY; PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF CLASSICS,
BRISTOL UNIVERSITY


TOBIAS REINHARDT  CORPUS CHRISTI PROFESSOR OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE,
OXFORD


FEDERICA NICOLARDI  PROFESSOR OF CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF NAPLES FEDERICO II


GIANLUCA DEL MASTRO  PROFESSOR OF PAPYROLOGY, L’UNIVERSITÀ DELLA CAMPANIA «L.
VANVITELLI»


DANIEL DELATTRE  EMERITUS RESEARCH DIRECTOR AND PAPYROLOGIST, CNRS AND IRHT


RICHARD JANKO  FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES; PROFESSOR OF
CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN


SPONSORS


JOSEPH JACKS  $250,000


ALEX GERKO  $250,000


NAT FRIEDMAN  $125,000


DANIEL GROSS  $125,000


JOHN & PATRICK COLLISON  $125,000


MATT MULLENWEG  $125,000


TOBI LUTKE  $50,000


GUILLERMO RAUCH  $50,000


ARTHUR BREITMAN  $50,000


MATT HUANG  $50,000


JULIA DEWAHL & DAN ROMERO  $50,000


ANONYMOUS  $50,000


BASTIAN LEHMANN  $25,000


AARON LEVIE  $25,000


IVAN ZHAO  $10,000


STEPHANIE SHER  $10,000


BRANDON REEVES  $10,000


RAYMOND RUSSELL  $10,000


VIGNAN VELIVELA  $10,000


AMJAD MASAD  $5,000


CONOR WHITE-SULLIVAN  $5,000

 



VILLA DEI PAPIRI ART BY ROCÍO ESPÍN


PARTNERS




EDUCELAB FUNDERS


THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION


THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES


THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION


THE DIGITAL RESTORATION INITIATIVE


THE ARTS & HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL OF GREAT BRITAIN


THE LIGHTHOUSE BEACON FOUNDATION — STANLEY AND KAREN PIGMAN


JOHN & KAREN MAXWELL


LEE & STACIE MARKSBURY

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