First word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll has been read

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Today we are announcing a major breakthrough in the Vesuvius Challenge: we have read the first word from an unopened Herculaneum scroll.

The word is "p??f??a?" which means "purple dye" or "cloths of purple."

scrollprize.org/firstletters

Congratulations to 21yo computer science student @LukeFarritor who is the first person to see this handwriting in nearly 2000 years. He has won the $40,000 First Letters prize for this world-historical achievement.

We are also awarding a $10,000 First Ink prize to @CJHandmer who was the first person to see ink and multiple letters within an unopened scroll. His work was the basis of Luke's ML model.

And @Youssef_M_Nader has won a $10,000 second-place First Letters prize for producing the clearest and most comprehensive images from inside a scroll yet.

This has been the dream of many people since the scrolls were first discovered in the 1750s. It is also the result of 20 years of work from Dr. Brent Seales and his team at EduceLab, whose years of dedicated work have made this last mile possible.

The $700,000 Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize is now in sight. Who will claim it?

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But there's more: a few days ago, @Youssef_M_Nader, working with new segmentations from the Vesuvius Challenge segmentation team, was able to generate this image of stunning clarity and size:

This is the revolution in digital papyrology that Dr. Seales has created. Nothing like this has ever happened before and papyrology will never be the same.

The last couple of months have been intensely electric for those of us working on the Vesuvius Challenge, and if progress continues, the coming months promise a deluge of new ancient text.

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