[versteegen]

Actually it's much worse than that. Only a very small fraction of the first of the two scanned scrolls has been segmented/unwrapped after 5 months, and it's the easiest parts that are done -- about 1000cm^2 across something like 100 layers of papyrus 10cm wide. Only 50cm^2 of scroll 2 is done. Where the sheets are right against each other is much harder.

[gojomo]

But at the same time: scanning tech & software automation just keep getting better, including via spillovers from other unrelated projects.

The ability of an ML system to learn to mimic what the manual "virtual unrolling" process is doing, from a small number of examples-to-follow, is growing.

Each bit of success, once confirmed by other experts or correlation with other texts, improves the training data.

Eventually a fully-software pushbutton pipeline of "raw imaging to likely texts" should be possible.

And if, say, some of the scrolls are sufficiently 'read' nondestructively to embolden teams to risk destructive techniques – such as incremental ablation while reading the exact chemicals at every coordinate – even higher-resolution data could become available.

[madacol]

But that's expected!

When you are discovering to do a new thing that nobody knows how to do, you first try a bunch of things manually to learn what works and what doesn't.

Only after you have a procedure that reliably works, you automate it.