Artificial intelligence and synchrotron X-ray tomography read charred Herculaneum scrolls for the first time, unveiling ancient philosophy sealed for 2,000 years. Swipe to see →
THE CATACLYSM OF 79 AD AND THE BURIED LIBRARY
In the autumn of 79 AD, the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius sealed the fate of the Roman settlements of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
TWO CENTURIES OF DESTRUCTIVE PHYSICAL METHODS
The historical rediscoveries began between 1752 and 1754, when well-diggers in the service of King Charles VII of Naples bored exploratory shafts and narrow subterranean galleries blindly into the volcanic rock.
THE NON-INVASIVE REVOLUTION
Seales celebrated a major milestone in 2015 with the virtual unrolling of the charred En-Gedi scroll found along the Dead Sea in Israel, revealing passages from the Book of Leviticus.
THE VESUVIUS CHALLENGE
Despite obtaining petabytes of pristine synchrotron scan data, the sheer geometric complexity of the compressed layers made manual segmentation and ink identification practically impossible for a single research lab.
THE RESCUED TEXT
The synergistic combination of Julian Schilliger’s automated segmentation and the neural detection pipelines engineered by Youssef Nader and Luke Farritor delivered the historic Grand Prize submission.