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Vesuvius Challenge Accepted - Ancient Burnt Scroll Read!
Luke Farritor won the grand prize in the global Vesuvius challenge! Characters were read from a tightly coiled burnt scroll from Vesuvius.
— John Kidenda (@johnkidenda) February 4, 2025
Predicted by science fiction! As I've mentioned before, science fiction fans recall that sf writer James P. Hogan described an idea he called the Trimagniscope in his excellent 1977 novel inherit the Stars
The image on the Trimagniscope tube was an enlarged view of one of the pocket-size books found on the body... The scope was adjusted to generate a view that followed the change in density along the boundary layer of the selected page, producing an image of the lower section of the book only; it was as if the upper part had been removed, like a cut deck of cards. Because of the age and condition of the book, however, the characters on the page thus exposed tended to be of poor quality and in some cases were incomplete. The next step would be to scan the image optically with TV cameras and feed the encoded pictures in the Navcomms computer complex. The raw input would then be processed by pattern recognition techniques and statistical techniques to produce a second, enhanced copy with many of the missing character fragments restored.
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