How AI is decoding ancient scrolls | Julian Schilliger and Youssef Nader

Youssef: We always think about the potential of AI changing the future.

But what about the potential of AI changing the past?

My name is Youssef Nader.

I'm an Egyptian AI researcher

and a PhD student at the Free University in Berlin

and last year, I led the Vesuvius Grand Prize winning team

on exploring this very question.

You see, the story starts almost 2,000 years ago.

A Greek philosopher that we believe was Philodemus of Gadara

sat in one of the many rooms of the Villa dei Papiri.

He talked about music, he talked about pleasure,

he talked about what makes things enjoyable,

questions that still plague us until today.

One of his scribes wrote down his thoughts on sheets of papyrus.

The sheets were rolled and stowed away for later generations.

Fast-forward 150 years, or even more

Mount Vesuvius erupts, burying Herculaneum, the villa

and the words of the philosopher under a sea of hot mud and ashes.

Now fast-forward again, to the 17th century.

People are excavating around the area.

They found beautiful statues, breathtaking frescoes

and some weird-looking pieces of charcoal,

like you see in this picture.

This is when the first scrolls were discovered,

and people were racing to excavate more of these.

What knowledge is included that is not known to us now?

What things should we know about these scrolls?

Julian: My name is Julian, and I am a digital archaeologist.

When the pyroclastic flow hit the scrolls,

it had a destructive effect.

It tore into them,

shredded off pieces,

and it charred them badly.

Even the deformation that you can see

happened at that point.

People, 250-something years ago,

were curious what's lying inside those scrolls,

hidden and not accessible anymore.

Because of a lack of technology,

they had to resort to physically unrolling

and thereby destroying most of the scrolls.

To this day,

only the most damaged and deformed scrolls

remain in their initial, rolled-up configuration.

Fast-forwarding a little bit,

the computer age arrives.

Youssef and I are born.

We are going on and getting our education --

(Julian Chuckles)

(Audience Laughs)

and well... at the same time, Brent Seales,

a researcher and professor,

had the idea to use CT scan technology

to actually digitilize the scrolls,

with the hope of, one day,

digitally unrolling them.

Behind me, you can see a video of such a CT scan,

and it goes through the CT scan 3D volume,

layer by layer.

The papyrus is visible as a spiral,

and you can see it's tightly wound-up,

sometimes touching each other, flaying off.

It's a difficult question, how to unroll this digitally.

Nat Friedman, a Silicon Valley investor,

also saw this research, and he wanted to help.

That was in 2022.

He reached out, and together with Brent Seales,

they created the Vesuvius Challenge,

with the goal to motivate nerds all over the world to solve this problem.

(Julian chuckles)

They created a grand prize,

promising eternal glory and monetary incentives

to anyone who could do that

(Julian Chuckles)

I myself saw that on the internet

while writing my master's thesis at ETH Zurich, in robotics

and I was instantly happy to solve it--

or at least try, why not, you know?

And I went on, joined the Discord community

where all the people that were also contestants

and playing with the scroll data

were exchanging ideas

and I joined there and started working on it.

Also there, on Discord,

I met Youssef and Luke [Farritor],

who would become my teammates,

and with whom I would actually win the grand prize.

Surprisingly, it went on, and made global headline news.

It even got into the British tabloids.

(Audience Laughs)

So when we started, there were two main problems still remaining.

One, you had to unroll the scroll.

And two, you then had to make the ink visible.

Youssef will tell you more about that part.