Machine learning is all the rage in Silicon Valley.

But it also might have the potential to solve a surprising problem: decoding ancient scrolls.

What’s happening:

• A SpaceX intern has won $40,000 from Scroll Prize for identifying the first ever words on an ancient scroll from over 2000 years ago
• The breakthrough came from leveraging a machine learning model to identify ink on a scroll that was previously believed to be completely illegible due to being carbonized by heat

The big idea:

• Nat Friedman, prolific angel investor and former leader of Github, launched Scroll Prize as a collaborative project offering $1M to decode ancient scrolls which were once considered to be illegible through machine learning and computer vision
• Daniel Gross, angel investor and former Y Combinator partner, is another founding sponsor of Scroll Prize

Going deeper:

• A vast collection of scrolls that were owned by Julius Caesar’s father in law were nearly thought to have been destroyed by hot mud and volcanic debris in 79 AD
• In 1750 AD those scrolls were discovered when an Italian farmer was digging a well and came across more than 600 individual scrolls that had been carbonized by heat and were impossible to unravel
• In 2015 there was a technical breakthrough by a team of researchers at the University of Kentucky which used computer vision to read a carbonized scroll entirely through technology and without unrolling it

Why it matters:

• Uncovering what is inside ancient scrolls could unlock deep insights into Greek and Roman philosophy, science, politics, mathematics and much more

The intrigue:

• Scroll Prize has a long list of notable supporters and sponsors including John and Patrick Collison, Matt Mullenweg, Tobi Lutke, Aaron Levie and many more
  

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