There’s nothing like a breakthrough, when a long delayed problem that no one could crack, suddenly yields to fresh thought. And opens the door to a vast potential new field of learning. Which is why this news from Nature Briefings has been such fun to read in itself, as well as digging into its juicy link article , which, by the way, is eminently readable. Essay on Pleasure revealed in Ancient Scroll

Student researchers have used machine learning to read text hidden inside charred, unopenable scrolls from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. The newly revealed passages discuss sources of pleasure including music, the colour purple and the taste of capers. The team trained an algorithm on tiny differences in texture where the ink had been, based on three-dimensional computed tomography scans of the scrolls.Nature | 7 min read

The point for us is this bringing together of two highly disparate disciplines. If archaeologists had said ”please give us enormous sums to crack the problem of the Herculaneum scrolls” someone would, very politely, have told them to go take a walk. And we take a safe guess that the principal interests of AI folk are directed towards finance, pharmaceuticals and physics. It’s when the two are brought together, serendipitously, that we see this marvellous synergy, this sum becoming worth infinitely more than its parts.

And what synergy! For all the many learned books which have been written about it, our knowledge of the Ancient World is actually rather limited. Even authors like Plato and Eratosthenes have only survived in a few, fragmentary texts. The same is true of many early Christian writings. There is only one fragment of the New Testament from before 150 AD, and its tiny. [1]The new CT technique could potentially decipher thousands of fragmentary or badly preserved texts. As our database suddenly grows, we may well find some startling new insights. Or old LSS doctrine that research money spent in one field will pay off in many seems to be vindicated once again. Time for a very smug cup of coffee. No biscuits.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_Testament_papyri

#archaeology #CT #AI #scrolls #herculaneum #greeks #romans #christians #jews