Washington:

Three researchers were awarded a $700,000 prize on Monday for using artificial intelligence to read 2,000-year-old scrolls that were scorched in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

According to organizers of the Vesuvius Challenge, the Herculaneum Papyrus consists of approximately 800 rolled Greek scrolls that were carbonized during the volcanic eruption in AD 79 that buried the ancient Roman town of Pompeii.

The scrolls, which resemble hardened ash logs and are kept at the Collège de France in Paris and the National Library in Naples, were severely damaged and even splintered when attempts were made to unroll them.

As an alternative, the Vesuvius Challenge performed high-resolution CT scans of four scrolls and offered a $1 million award to promote research on them.

The three winners are Berlin doctoral student Youssef Nader, Nebraska student and SpaceX intern Luke Farritor, and Swiss robotics student Julian Schilliger.

The team used artificial intelligence to help differentiate between ink and papyrus, and used pattern recognition to spot faint and nearly illegible Greek letters.

“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods in the ancient world,” classicist Robert Fowler, president of the Herculaneum Society, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

The challenge requires researchers to decipher four paragraphs of at least 140 characters, in which at least 85% of the characters can be recovered.

Last year, Farito deciphered the first word of one of the scrolls, which turned out to be the Greek word for “purple.”

Their combined efforts have now decrypted about five percent of the scrolls, according to organizers.

Contest organizer Nat Friedman wrote on Enjoy life.”

The scrolls were discovered in a villa believed to have formerly belonged to Julius Caesar’s aristocratic father-in-law, whose largely unexcavated estate housed a library housing thousands of manuscripts.

The competition is the brainchild of Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Friedman, founder of Github, a software and coding platform acquired by Microsoft.

Recovering ancient texts that have never been seen would be a huge breakthrough: Only an estimated 3 to 5 percent of ancient Greek texts have survived, according to the University of California, Irvine.

Federica Nicoradi of the University of Naples Federico II told the Guardian: “This was the beginning of a revolution in the Herculaneum papyri and in Greek philosophy as a whole. It is the only papyrus from ancient Roman times. ‘s library.”

In the concluding paragraph, the scroll’s author “casts shade at unnamed ideological opponents—the Stoics, perhaps?—who ‘have nothing to say about happiness, either in general or in particular,’” Friedman said.

He added that the next phase of the competition will attempt to use the research to unlock 85% of the scrolls.

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