Dr. Brent Seales spent decades trying to read a book that cannot be opened.
This summer his team showed they can unwrap and read a complete scroll, and presented results from three, without unrolling a single one.
The Herculaneum library is the only library from classical antiquity that survived. Mount Vesuvius buried it in 79 AD and carbonized roughly 1,800 scrolls into something closer to charcoal than paper.
The ones that could be opened were opened, many of them destroyed in the attempt. The worst of the worst stayed unreadable for more than two centuries. Those are the ones Brent went after.
Two breakthroughs made it possible. The first is the synchrotron, a particle accelerator X-ray source with about 40 or 50 in the world, which scans a scroll at a resolution finer than a red blood cell. The second is machine learning, which finds the faint ink signal buried in all that noise. Carbon ink on carbonized papyrus leaves almost no density difference, which is why senior colleagues told Brent the problem could never be solved.
The Vesuvius Challenge, which Brent co-founded with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, meant open sourcing a decade of research and data. That decision was not obvious, and Brent walks through the internal debate. What it bought was scale: roughly 2,000 competitors solving the ink labeling bottleneck in parallel, a Discord community of thousands of people, and a talent funnel far larger than Brent could have built alone. Many contributors ended up joining the team.
The technical phase is now substantially complete, and Brent describes the shift plainly: the conversation has moved from imaging to the lost voices being restored. Around 400 scrolls remain unread, 40 are already scanned, and a new $1 million prize is open for reading a full scroll. He also explains why virtual unwrapping improves with every scroll it reads, in a way older technologies never did, and why the provenance of these texts is unassailable: original works from antiquity, never filtered through medieval scribes.
Brent Seales is the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science at the University of Kentucky and co-founder of the Vesuvius Challenge. He and his work are the subject of The Vesuvius Challenge, an upcoming documentary from Infinite Films and Scott Free, in partnership with Calliope Pictures, narrated by Guy Pearce. He joins host Nick Tawil on Infinite Loops.
KEY INSIGHTS
- The only surviving library from antiquity. Herculaneum's roughly 1,800 scrolls are original works never copied by medieval scribes, which makes both their provenance and their content uniquely reliable.
- Two miracles made it work. Synchrotron scans resolve detail finer than a red blood cell, and machine learning amplifies an ink signal too faint for the human eye.
- Open source outpaced the lab. Roughly 2,000 competitors and a Discord community of thousands of people solved the ink labeling bottleneck far faster than Brent's team could alone, and the contest became a recruiting funnel.
- The method compounds. Unlike most technologies, virtual unwrapping gets better with every scroll it reads, because each one adds training data.
- The work is shifting from engineering to reading. With the technology substantially proven, the conversation moves to papyrologists and the lost texts themselves.
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:50 Reading a Book You Cannot Open
5:20 Inside the Only Library From Antiquity
9:12 From Computer Vision to Ancient Scrolls
11:35 Synchrotrons and Seeing Inside a Scroll
14:57 Why He Open Sourced a Decade of Work
18:24 How the Contest Became a Recruiting Funnel
19:51 What Was Revealed in Naples
22:51 Why the Technology Improves With Every Scroll
25:39 AI Used to Look Backward
27:08 What Is Still Buried at the Villa
29:06 Original Works, Not Medieval Copies
31:24 The New $1 Million Prize
34:27 Bench Sources, Beamlines and Grid Scans
39:29 The Colleagues Who Said It Was Impossible
42:05 The Labeling Problem 2,000 People Solved
45:44 The En-Gedi Scroll and the Book of Leviticus
50:54 What the Lost Library Might Still Hold
56:00 Two Ideas for the World
Vesuvius Challenge: https://scrollprize.org
