I couldn't tell you about our future funding efforts or possible crowd funding. That's not in my wheelhouse.

Granted none of the core team are web developers so updates to the website are best effort.

Damage to the artifacts is less than you might expect. I think that the radiation is particulary dangerous to living tissue and fiber. The scrolls are inert, pure carbon charcoal bricks for the most part and not particularly vulnerable to high power xrays.

This announcement was part of a larger conference being put on by Frederica Nicolardi, our lead papyrologist. The livestream of each day are available at: https://www.youtube.com/@cispemgigante/streams .

We are not associated with them, but they're a team of scholars that hosted an open challenge to do automated translation of Akkadian texts. Their first competition ended a few months ago but I believe they plan on hosting another at some point focused on doing image recognition to help speed up the transcription and translation of the tablets that you mentioned.

Virtual unrolling and reading are not terribly hard to do manually, they are just not feasable on a large scale. Like years and years of human time spent tediously clicking on papyrus and labelling ink in renders, so a large amount of automation is required.

A lot of difficulty has come from the first step: xraying the scrolls. It's hard and expensive and difficult to get right. The efforts since this all began with CT scanning 25 years ago has been kneecapped by the data simply not being good enough. We xray on what is AFAIK literally the most powerful xray beamline in the world and we would still like for it to be more powerful and faster. Not to mention the massive amounts of data. For Pherc Paris 3, our largest scroll, the raw reconstructed data is 260 terabytes. That's a lot of data to have to deal with.

There is an extremely large overlap between a lot of the work we do with medical imaging, CT scanning, XRay technology, and such. A lot of the ML models and frameworks we have used and adapted for our purposes originated in the medical field for things like cancer detection or segmenting different body parts.

> Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.

A VSauce video I watched a long time ago described that realization as "chronosonder". I think trying to understand those that came before us and why they made the decisions that they did given the circumstances they were in can help better inform us of the things we choose to do given our own circumstances.

Otherwise, I think that a lot of things are worth doing just to see if it's possible. I like to lift weights and I'm training to lift the Dinnie Stones one day; a pair of stones that are a combined ~730 pounds. The physical and mental benefits of exercise and training are well documented and great but at the end of the day I just _really_ wanna pick up 2 stones. There's nothing more to it than that, and that's ok with me.

One of the things we said a lot in 2023 was "We just wanna read the scrolls" but that slogan has unfortunately fallen a bit by the wayside as the goal and path got longer and initial hype started to fade, but I think it perfectly encapsulates why: The scrolls are there. They can be read. Why not read them?

We unfortunately get a lot of slop submissions, which is unfortunate. I think a _really_ good place to start is simply joining the discord and looking at the data we've published and trying to replicate something or anything really. We understand that not everyone is a researcher that can jump in making awesome immediately applicate submissions.

Granted, that's pretty specifically for people that want to submit for prizes and prize money. Everyone on the team absolutely loves to talk shop and interact with real people with real interest, so if you show it in the discord we are all more than happy to help, engage, fix bugs, gvmive advice, etc.

I would personally love to see more open source and contributed papyrology and translation, musing on difficult readings etc.

For the more technically inclined, testing software, pointing out bugs, and actually running and trying to fix things is a huge positive that we like. We get a lot of slop submissions that are just someone pasting an issue on our GitHub into codex or Claude. We don't want to encourage that. We can do that ourselves.

I feel the opposite of that feeling and am immensely proud of everything that the core challenge team has accomplished

Though I have an interest in Old Norse and I spend a lot of time reading Scandinavian runestones. > 90% of them are grave markers for a dead father, mother, brother, sister, cousin, etc. If I've learned anything from that, it's that people across time and space all lead lives as real and complex as anyone else's. Their joys were as high as mine have been and their sorrows as low as mine have been.