Nvidia GTX 1070 used to translate ancient scroll

An Nvidia graphics card was used alongside AI to partially decipher the text inside a fire-damaged scroll from ancient Herculaneum

Herculaneum was buried in ash and volcanic stone alongside Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD.

Much of the history on culture of that time and place is preserved in scrolls that are scorched and damaged by heat and ash, but with the aid of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070, the task of deciphering the writings inside might have just got a bit easier.

In 1986, a cache of scrolls was re-discovered in Herculaneum in the so-called Villa of the Papyri. The villa had previously been partially excavated on the order of King Charles VII of Naples, but the site and information about it were lost shortly after 1750.

Over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls have been discovered, but the damage suffered by the scrolls thanks to the volcanic eruptions makes them incredibly hard to read.

Modern GPU used to decipher the ancient text

Modern researchers use a process of taking X-rays of the scrolls, so it is no longer necessary to attempt to open the scrolls to read them and thus risk further damage. However, several scrolls use carbon-based ink, which makes it very difficult to distinguish the words on the page from the heat-damaged pages themselves.

A researcher named Dr Brent Seales set up The Vesuvius Challenge, which offers prizes to anyone who can decipher any words from the scrolls.

To facilitate this, Dr. Seales and his team used a particle accelerator alongside the X-ray machine to make a high-quality scan of two scrolls, which were then made available to researchers and scientists all over the world.

An undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln named Luke Farritor took up the challenge and decided to configure his old Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card in order to train an AI model to detect certain ‘crackle patterns’ that would indicate where the ink for a latter would have been.

Using this method, the Greek word porphyras (πορφυρας) was identified, a word which can mean the colour purple, or used to describe purple dye or purple clothes.

The correct identification of this word won Farritor a cash prize of $40,000.

The GTX 1070 might be considered slightly out-of-date technology to many, but this discovery just goes to prove that old does not mean useless.