Absolutely ancient Nvidia GPU used to decode even more antediluvian Roman scroll
You there, at the back. Stop sniggering. That isn't what it looks like, its an important artifact from ancient Herculaneum, okay? And it's just been decoded by something almost as elderly, but significantly less crappy; none other than an Nvidia GTX 1070.
How so, you cry? The rather unprepossessing lump shown above is actually a 2,000-ish year old scroll that got caught up in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79CE. It's burned and baked to the extent that it's entirely impossible to unwind without destroying it. The thing would crumble into ash. So, novel methods are needed to peer inside its secrets.
The simple version is that you scan it with x-rays. The complicated bit is that the ink used on such scrolls back in the day is carbon based and thus tricky to pick out from, well, the rather carbonised body of the scroll itself.
In a process we're going to call «science», apparently the solution is to somehow augment conventional x-ray scanning with a particle accelerator scan. You then run the output through a machine learning model and—presto!—clean, legible text. Well, sort of.
It was actually Luke Farritor, a 21-year-old computer science undergrad at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who managed the breakthrough with his GTX 1070, earning a $40,000 prize from Nvidia (via Toms Hardware) in the process.
The breakthrough work is said to have isolated the word "πορφυρας" from the scroll, which means «purple dye» or «cloths of purple.» Yup, those eight letters netted $40,000. Decent work, if you can find it. Actually, it's all part of the Vesuvius Challenge. Set up by Nat Friedman, former GitHub CEO, it offers a total prize fund of $1 million in return for decoding the scrolls.
Best Black Friday PC gaming deals:
Read more on pcgamer.com
