When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., it buried hundreds of papyrusscrolls. They were rediscovered in the mid-1700s, remembers Smithsonian magazine, "the onlysurviving collection of its kind from the Greco-Romanworld..." "But when scholars tried to unroll them, the carbonized manuscriptscrumbled to dust."Every generation that followed faced the same dilemma: They could wait fortechnology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient textsin their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrollsthemselves — and risk destroying them. In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Usingadvanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they're decipheringthe scrolls without needing to unroll them at all. The Vesuvius Challengehas accelerated the process by turning it into a public competition,complete with cash prizes. In 2023, a student won $40,000 fordeciphering asingle word — "purple" — from an unopened scroll. Later,contestants would identify 2,000 Greek characters from one scroll ($700,000) and the title of another ($60,000). Now, for the very first time,researchers have recovered allsurviving text from a single scroll. The nearly five-foot-longsegment includes roughly 20 columns of ancient Greek philosophy,accessible for the first time in nearly 2,000 years. "The tech actually does look like magic, but it's not," BrentSeales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, saidat a pressconference. (The article points out that Seales partnered with two Silicon Valley investors in 2023 to launch the Vesuvius Challenge, and is now hailing "the restoration of lost voices from the ancient world."Seales has been working on virtually unwrapping thescrolls since the early 2000s. The process involved imaging thebundles of papyrus using technology similar to CT scanners, isolatingthin layers and then stitching them together.... "We've developeda systematic and a repeatable approach," Seales told the audience."Now it's only a matter of time until we read all of thescrolls."Read more of this story at Slashdot.