The Vesuvius Challenge offers a $700,000 Grand Prize for unlocking the secrets of the Herculaneum papyri, ancient scrolls buried and carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Recently, there have been breakthroughs in reading the scrolls, with contestants Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader discovering letters and words within unopened scrolls. These discoveries were made possible through the use of machine learning models and the analysis of CT scans. The progress made so far is a testament to the collaborative efforts of contestants, the segmentation team, and the open-source approach of the Vesuvius Challenge. The race to uncover more hidden knowledge is still on, and the $700,000 Grand Prize is now within reach.
https://scrollprize.org/firstletters