Husker wins grand prize for global Vesuvius Challenge
Aaron Nix
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12/20/2023
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Luke Farritor, a senior in UNL's Raikes School, is the first to decode a passage of text from an ancient scroll using AI. He's the co-winner of the $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize. Read more about his discoveries here: https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article-2/
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- [00:00:00.000](contemplative music)
- [00:00:09.041]So I've always been interested in history.
- [00:00:10.625]Growing up, I learned Latin.
- [00:00:12.125]I was never that good at it, but I was always kind of into that sort of stuff.
- [00:00:14.791]Read a lot about the Roman Empire and things.
- [00:00:16.958]And one day I was just listening to a podcast back in March.
- [00:00:20.041]It was with Nat Friedman.
- [00:00:21.250]He just kind of got on the podcast, explained like,
- [00:00:23.375]there are these burnt up scrolls that were buried in the Pompeii eruption.
- [00:00:26.958]No one knows how to read them, but some professors have created CT
- [00:00:30.875]scans of these scrolls and they uploaded the data on the Internet
- [00:00:34.291]as a competition to see who could find writing inside of these scrolls.
- [00:00:37.750]And when I heard that idea, I was just immediately like,
- [00:00:39.875]Oh my goodness, this is such a cool project.
- [00:00:42.166]I have to work on this.
- [00:00:43.291]I just went home from work that day,
- [00:00:44.958]at the end of the day and working on it evenings and weekends ever since.
- [00:00:48.333]I run most of the things from my laptop.
- [00:00:50.291]It's just a normal Macbook, don't worry.
- [00:00:52.083]But then I've just got like five surplus computers in here.
- [00:00:56.333]This is what I do most of my work from.
- [00:01:00.791]The Raikes School
- [00:01:01.541]and just the University of Nebraska as a whole has provided
- [00:01:04.041]a great educational background where I can then, you know, take these skills
- [00:01:07.250]that I've learned and apply them to problems like this.
- [00:01:12.625]I just spend hours upon hours staring at
- [00:01:16.250]flattened pieces of the scroll like this, trying to find these patterns,
- [00:01:19.333]which are part of the writing.
- [00:01:21.875]At the start of the challenge
- [00:01:23.291]we had not been able to find any writing at all within these scrolls.
- [00:01:27.041]There are hundreds of these scrolls that are from the mansion.
- [00:01:29.458]We've scanned a couple of them
- [00:01:31.041]and no one had been able to find any writing in them using these methods.
- [00:01:35.125]Late one Saturday night I was sitting at a party
- [00:01:37.833]at a friend's house in Omaha
- [00:01:39.458]and I got a text from another person on the challenge team and he says, “Hey,
- [00:01:43.166]I've just uploaded this new kind of piece of the scroll.
- [00:01:46.458]You should take a look at it.”
- [00:01:47.750]I remotely access my computer.
- [00:01:49.250]I type into it like, “Please run the algorithm on this new piece of scroll.”
- [00:01:53.416]And then I just kind of start it. I pull out my phone again
- [00:01:55.708]just nonchalantly like, “Hey, I wonder how that went.”
- [00:01:58.041]And there are three Greek letters on the screen.
- [00:02:00.166]Letters I'd never seen before.
- [00:02:01.916]It was really cool because it's like, Oh my goodness, like
- [00:02:04.708]we actually detected new writing in the scrolls using A.I..
- [00:02:07.791]And that was the moment I realized, like, this is actually going to work.
- [00:02:10.166]Like, we were probably going to read the scrolls.
- [00:02:12.583]And I completely freaked out.
- [00:02:13.625]My friends were there and I was cheering, jumping up and down,
- [00:02:16.375]you know, screaming, crying all the stuff.
- [00:02:18.166]I, you know, took a picture of the results and I sent them to my mom.
- [00:02:21.458]She called me and she's like, “Hey, these look great!” You know?
- [00:02:24.125]It was a really special moment.
- [00:02:25.666]Yeah.
- [00:02:25.916]So this is the the word that I actually found.
- [00:02:28.375]It's right here.
- [00:02:29.125]It's the word Porphyras, which translates to purple.
- [00:02:33.166]It's the first word we found in the scrolls.
- [00:02:34.916]It was reviewed by a committee of kind of Greek scholars, but it's the word purple.
- [00:02:38.958]And I'm glad it's not the word “in” or “the” or “an” that we found
- [00:02:41.958]first, we actually found a word that has meaning.
- [00:02:44.666]This would not be possible without modern A.I.
- [00:02:47.041]modern scanning text techniques.
- [00:02:48.791]People wanted to read these books for hundreds of years and this
- [00:02:51.833]seems like the only way
- [00:02:52.791]that's where it's really possible to do that.
- [00:02:55.291]Now we're reading entire paragraphs from the scrolls,
- [00:02:57.833]and hopefully we'll be able to read the entire book and read the hundreds
- [00:03:00.916]of other books that were buried in this condition as well.
- [00:03:04.291]When you found this first word, you know, we went public with it.
- [00:03:06.625]And I think everyone has been very pleasantly surprised
- [00:03:08.875]by the amount of attention it's gotten.
- [00:03:10.583]As a college student, it's definitely been overwhelming in the best way possible.
- [00:03:14.166]But it's been really cool to get to kind of, you know, talk about my findings
- [00:03:17.333]and, you know, share what I want to do in the future with so many people.
- [00:03:20.791]So it's been overwhelming in the best possible way.
- [00:03:23.541]The University of Nebraska does a really good job
- [00:03:25.750]of encouraging their students to think boldly.
- [00:03:27.583]And I think that's played a pivotal role in my work on this project.
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