In 79 a.d., Mount Vesuvius erupted, engulfing the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum in superhot ash. The high heat carbonized hundreds of scrolls in a Herculaneum library, transforming them into lumps of charcoal. In 1752, workers uncovered these ancient artifacts. But the scrolls couldn’t be unrolled without crumbling. No one could read anything written on them—until now.
Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, developed a way to see inside the scrolls using high-tech 3-D scans. Still, any writing was hard to distinguish from the surrounding soot. So Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge—a contest to encourage people to decode the writing.
Luke Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, identified the first word last summer. He’d built an artificial intelligence program to recognize patterns in the digital scans. It revealed the Greek word porphyras, meaning “purple.” Farritor won $40,000 for his breakthrough. Four months later, Farritor was part of the first group to decipher 15 columns of text in the first scroll, sharing the grand prize: $700,000!