Summary
Several paragraphs of text have been decoded from the inside of a scroll that was buried during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. These scrolls were too fragile to physically unroll, so researchers took high resolution CT scans of the scrolls, and released the data to the public, promising $700,000 to the first team to decode 4 passages from the inside of the scroll, based on the scan (along with a number of other prizes along the way), before the end of 2023.
Quotes
My thoughts
This is an achievement that could only have been done with machine learning, and the technical feat here can't be understated. It has taken a lot of work to get this far, it's incredible to see what the community can achieve when it's given a goal like this. The $1M+ prize pool (donated by various mostly rich people) certainly helped to incentivise people to participate, and it will be interesting to see if this model gets adopted for any other projects in the future. If they are able to achieve their goal of extending this technology to read all 800 scrolls, this will be a big breakthrough in our understanding of Ancient Rome, let alone the other potential places where this technology could be used.
Sources
Official announcement: https://scrollprize.org/grandprize