“I can’t imagine it labored!” says Nat Friedman, co-founder of the Vesuvius Problem, which supplied $1m in prizes to anybody who might use synthetic intelligence (AI) to decipher papyrus scrolls carbonised by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD. However work it did. On February fifth Mr Friedman introduced {that a} three-person workforce had been awarded $700,000 for efficiently extracting 4 passages of textual content, every a minimum of 140 characters lengthy, and with a minimum of 85% of the characters legible, from a scroll often called Banana Boy. The three winners, Luke Farritor, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, are all computer-science college students.
