[_boffin_]

I am floored at these achievements. Such amazing work.

If I may ask, when you started thinking about achieving this, what were the first attempts, ideas on how to go about it? What were some of the obstacles that had to be overcome to achieve this ?

[verditelabs]

The process of trying to read the scrolls has been going on for about 275 years or so, now. Doing it nondestructively via CT scanning and virtual unrolling and reading has been in the works for 25 years or so, so it's a lot of building on previous work.

Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.

A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.

[Upvoter33]

Lots of great work that pioneered here (I wish the website did a better job showing that?)

e.g., Dr. Brett Seales and his decades of work: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1601247

[verditelabs]

Brent is an advisor on the Vesuvius Challenge. He's listed on our website as such but the work we are doing and specifically that which falls under the Vesuvius Challenge is separate from him (apart from his being an advisor), EduceLab lab at U of K, and U of K as a whole. The purpose of the scrollprize website is not to showcase the 25 years of research leading up to the Vesuivus Challenge. It's to showcase what the Vesuivus Challenge is doing.

Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.

[Upvoter33]

ah cool - thanks for the clarification. some of the comments here read like nothing like this has ever been done before ...

[mmooss]

> We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster.

What makes power relevent here? Obviously medical applications aren't particulary powerful, are quick, and are very useful. Is it harder to penetrate the material than the human body? Is the increased power due to increased resolution - i.e., increased pixels/cm^2 rather than increased watts/pixel? The latter would seem to risk damaging the artifact?

[verditelabs]

We scan the full scrolls a 2.4 micron and scan portions of them at up to .5 micron. This is 1000x to 4000x higher resolution than your standard medical CT scanner, so that requires a lot more power to get readings at such high resolution. There are other properties that make large synchrotrons more amenable to our task but I am not an xray technician so am not qualified to speak to most of them.

Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.

[tokioyoyo]

This is one of the most fascinating comments I’ve ever read. Thank you so much!

I was wondering, how does this all get funded?

[rjtavares]

There's a sponsors and partners list on their webpage: https://scrollprize.org/#sponsors

[anentropic]

Just wonderful

Wonderful that all of this amazing technology exists

Wonderful that we used it to read these ancient scrolls

Thank you

[skew-aberration]

Where can we read about the xray setup? e.g the type of sensor, if/how the target and/or beam is scanned, any fancy gratings/etc, what kind of CT algorithms are used

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Parent comment says "Beam Line 18 at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility"

so https://www.esrf.fr/home/UsersAndScience/Experiments/BM18.ht...

https://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/pr/2022/20221031_bm18.html