Ancient scrolls, Herculaneum

• Herculaneum was an ancient Roman town, located in the modern-day comune of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. It was buried under volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE.
• The Herculaneum Papyri is more than 1,800 papyrus scrolls written with ink made primarily of charcoal mixed with water, and discovered in the 18th century in the Villa of the Papyri, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law (named after a unique Herculaneum’s library of papyri scrolls, discovered in 1750) in Herculaneum
• Due to the eruption, many papyrus scrolls are unreadable. Therefore, we need AI to decode ancient scrolls that have been unreadable for centuries
• The Vesuvius Challenge is a competition to read ancient scrolls launched in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist and financially supported by Elon Musk through a charitable organization, the Musk Foundation