How ancient Herculaneum papyrus scrolls were deciphered

Virtual unwrapping was born from a vision that I had where we might be able to explore the interior of something without having to actually physically open it. And so how to do that was really a software problem once you take an image that goes all the way through the middle of something, like an x-ray, and look at it and unwrap it and unfold it without ever having to do that to the real object. The scrolls from Herculaneum were not excavated in a way where they were pristine. I wish that were true, but in fact, had they been perfectly preserved, they might not have survived. The irony there is that the volcanic eruption that carbonized them, which is to say made them like charcoal, probably also saved them. It's an extremely difficult technical challenge to then figure out how to actually read them. At the Diamond Light Source facility outside of Oxford, we imaged two of their scrolls in a high-energy physics context. The Herculaneum scrolls in particular are basically the most challenging they could be in every way. It's kind of amazing that this is even possible. We released a lot of our code and methods, so we made those open source and we invited people to build on them and contribute. First of all, to test and sort of reproduce and verify our results, and then to help us move it forward. What the Vesuvius Challenge, which is a competitive prize, allowed us to do was to enlist over a thousand research teams to work on a problem that normally we would only have five people working on. Those people working on that problem for three months, I estimate they probably spent ten person years and probably two compute years over those three months working just on the problem of Herculaneum Inc. Working on this challenge for a very long time, since it basically launched, and I got a text from someone else on the Vesuvius Challenge team and they said, hey, we've just uploaded this new flattened piece of papyrus, seems kind of interesting, it's got these patterns that we've been talking about. So I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting, you know, I pull out my little phone, I type in, you know, please run the algorithm on this new fine piece. And I see these letters, not as clear, but I saw these letters. I absolutely think it's doable, you know, you look at this image, you can see a bunch of other letters peeking out, these ones with the boxes are ones we've kind of really confirmed. So you've just got to take this, iterate, work really hard, lots of experiments, I think it's very, very doable. Probably in the 20th century, the biggest revelation of text from the ancient world was the Dead Sea Scroll Collection from the 1940s and 50s. I think revealing Herculaneum with the size of that corpus in the 21st century would be the biggest discovery from the ancient world.