IA: Student recovers section of charred parchment – 10/18/2023 – Tech

American university student Luke Farritor, 21, managed to restore the contents of a parchment from the year 79 AD with the help of artificial intelligence, according to an article published in the magazine Nature last Thursday (12).

It was the first case of recovery of a completely charred material, whose writings were made of carbon ink. The text we had access to belongs to the only library of classical antiquity with comprehensible writings, the Vila dos Papiros. The collection that was owned by the Roman nobility is in Italy.

The writings were buried by an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius that year, which turned the papyrus into charcoal. At the same time, burial prevented wear and tear due to oxidation of the paint. To avoid damaging the material, the researchers performed CT scans with the parchment still rolled up.

The discovery is part of a collective challenge to recover knowledge lost due to the natural disaster, the Vesuvius Challenge, launched in March this year. The initiative already brings together 1,500 teams of researchers.

The excerpt discovered by Farritor, for example, is the first reference in written records of the period to purple, a rare pigment at the time of the Roman Empire and traded, literally, at the price of gold.

Farritor received a prize of US$40,000 (R$201,512) for discovering the first piece of material — 10 characters in four square centimeters. Second place in the race, Youssef Nader, received US$10,000 (R$50,378). The Vesuvius Challenge will distribute, in total, US$ 1 million (around R$ 5 million) in prizes.

Behind the challenge is professor Brent Seales, from the University of Kentucky. Coordinator of the Educe Lab digital restoration project for historical objects, he was the first person to use computational models to recover charred historical passages.

They were parchments from the book Leviticus, present in the Old Testament of the Bible and in the Jewish holy book Torah, found in the Ein Gedi nature reserve, in Israel. The difference is that the passages found in Israeli territory were written with metallic pigment ink, which appears clearly on x-rays, since the particles are denser than those of papyrus.

The ink used on the Vesuvius scrolls was carbon-based, that is, it has the same density as paper, also carbon-based.

Seale, however, realized that he could use the artificial intelligence model used to read passages written in metallic ink to identify changes in the surface of the paper, where the carbon ink had been fixed.

The necessary precision was only achieved by taking the scrolls to a particle accelerator at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. X-ray beams obtained from accelerating electrons deliver the highest resolution available in current technology.

He and his team then turned their efforts to digitizing the recovered excerpts, which were then made available to challenge participants. “Only half of one of the two parchments was given to the challenge participants. The rest of the material remained with our team for confirmation purposes”, says Seales to Sheet.

Participants have access to the codes used in the artificial intelligence model developed by Seales and to previous research data. This way, they can optimize their own models to perform the proposed task.

Farritor, for example, ran the code on his own cell phone, when he realized that the excerpt sent to him contained letters that were visible to the naked eye. He received an alert about the new section available when he was at a party, one night in August.

The participant who first manages to translate four passages of continuous and plausible texts, containing at least 140 characters, will receive the grand prize of US$700,000 (around R$3,500).

The challenge was the idea of ​​former Microsoft executive Nat Friedman, who is sponsoring the initiative with US$250,000 (about R$1.25 million). Another 20 people finance the project.

The Village of Papyri, where the parchments were preserved, was owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lúcio Calpúrnio Pisão Cesonino. The city of Herculaneum was not devastated by magma, just covered in ash, which was enough for its inhabitants to abandon it.

From what was managed to recover from the ruins of Herculaneum in better conditions, there are excerpts already analyzed that refer to the thoughts of the philosopher Epicurus, known for his four remedies for the soul (tetrapharmaceutical): there is nothing to fear about the gods; there is no need to fear death; happiness is possible; we can escape pain through the education of the senses.

Archaeologists have also identified writings by a lesser-known philosopher named Philodemus, on topics such as vice, music, rhetoric and death.

Recovering the historical records of Herculaneum was considered impossible for a long time, says Bruno Teruel, a Brazilian member of Professor Seales’ laboratory at the University of Kentucky. He worked with both intact and damaged scrolls until May of this year. Until then, only isolated letters had been identified.

They were the biggest discoveries about the Vila dos Papiros collection at that time. “With Luke’s discovery [Farritor] we will be able to immensely expand this knowledge”, says Teruel.