The Vesuvius Challenge awarded a $50,000 First Letters Prize to Erwin Nieuwlaar, a freelance software engineer, for producing the first text read from PHerc. 343 since the scroll was carbonised in AD 79. He traced the scroll surface with the project’s open-source spiral-fitter, adapted it to an 8.64 micron scan of PHerc. 343 and added his own method for snapping segments to the papyrus surface, then averaged four community-built ink-detection models that had not been trained on that scroll. The submission met the challenge’s bar of ten readable letters in four square centimetres, yielding a Greek sequence the project’s papyrologists read as part of the phrase for ‘everything that happens’, and the challenge notes that its open science setup lets others reproduce the result. The post also credits later submissions built on the ScrollFiesta! unwrapping pipeline and says the larger Grand Prize is still open.
$50K First Letters Prize awarded for PHerc. 343
The Vesuvius Challenge awarded a $50,000 First Letters Prize to Erwin Nieuwlaar, a freelance software engineer, for producing the first text read from PHerc. 343 since the scroll was carbonised in AD 79. He traced the scroll surface with the project's open-source spiral-fitter, adapted it to an 8.64 micron scan of PHerc. 343 and added his own method for snapping segments to the papyrus surface, then averaged four community-built ink-detection models that had not been trained on that scroll. The submission met the challenge's bar of ten readable letters in four square centimetres, yielding a Greek sequence the project's papyrologists read as part of the phrase for 'everything that happens', and the challenge notes that its open science setup lets others reproduce the result. The post also credits later submissions built on the ScrollFiesta! unwrapping pipeline and says the larger Grand Prize is still open.
Source: Substack