Nebraska student uses A.I. to decipher ancient scroll; prof. says beginning of something big

LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) - Twenty-one-year-old Luke Farritor is a computer science student at UNL.

He’s also the winner of the First Letters Prize. It’s part of the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to decipher ancient papyrus scrolls from the Roman city of Herculaneum. Many of them are fossilized from the Mount Vesuvius eruption almost 2,000 years ago.

“There are just hundreds of these scrolls just sitting in museums in Europe, waiting to be read,” Farritor said. “No one knows how to read them.”

They’re too brittle to handle.

“They’re all crumpled up, they’re burned, they’re flakey,” Farritor said. “You can’t just unroll them. People have tried. Nothing’s really worked.”

However, University of Kentucky professor Dr. Brent Seales took 3D X-ray scans of them and uploaded them to the internet.

With the help of AI, Farritor revealed the word “purple,” from a scroll.

“You need to use AI to actually take the ink and make it visible because you can’t just look at the scan and see the ink,” he said.

Deciphering a single word was not a short process. Farritor said from March to September, he spent two to five hours a day working to reveal the text.

Dr. Jeanne Reames is the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program director at UNO. She said what’s really huge about this is what we might find by reading the old, charred texts.

“I do Alexander the Great,” Reames said. “I would dearly love to find the writing of a guy called Marsyas, who went to school with Alexander and wrote about Macedonian culture and all sorts of things. We don’t have his writings.”

Also among these scrolls could be the writings of Seneca the Elder, who Reames said witnessed the Roman Republic’s collapse and its empire’s birth, which could be a cautionary tale for those of us living in modern civilizations.

“Here are the things you don’t want to do if you want to keep your democracy,” Reames said. “Or in the case of Rome, your republic.”

In addition to the national attention he’s been getting, Farritor won $40,000 for his work.

“Money’s great,” he said. “Very encouraging, for sure. Definitely helps me buy more computers to work on reading the rest of the scroll.”

That’s what he’s going for next: The $700,000 grand prize to read four passages in the scrolls’ inner layers by the end of this year.

Farritor said since being recognized for winning this part of the Vesuvius Challenge, he has already gotten several job offers from tech startups and Space X, which is where he spent his internship. He said right now, he’s focusing on winning that grand prize though.

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