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The Vesuvius Challenge has awarded a $50,000 First Letters Prize on PHerc. 306B, a carbonised scroll from the Villa dei Papiri that no one had read since Mount Vesuvius buried it in AD 79. The winners are Liam Warner, a freelance software engineer in northern England, and Nicola Bodill, an MA student at the University of Sydney who works on a Gandharan Buddhist birch-bark manuscript.

It took 25 submissions on this one scroll before the prize criteria were met.

Why it was close

The prize target was 10 readable characters inside a 4 cm² area. Several teams landed on exactly the same region and fell just short, recovering sequences of 7, 8 or 9 characters. Those teams were The Gold Panners, Grilli Security Research Team, Matteo Bulloni, Clovis Hublin, TAUIL-Abd-Elilah, Ben Kyles and colleagues, Les Copronautes and Doom Scrollers.

The sequence τοδιαυτο had been spotted in multiple submissions for almost a month. What followed it stayed too faint for the papyrology team to agree on. The traces after it read as either a mu or a nu, and in majuscule script Μ, Ν and ΑΙ can look nearly identical.

Warner and Bodill’s image made the middle stroke of the second alpha visible, rising diagonally from the bottom of the left oblique stroke as it does in the first alpha. For the first time the papyrologists agreed on αι.

What the text says

Bodill’s proposed reading is τὸ δι᾽ αὑτὸ αἱρετόν, “that which is desirable in itself.” The phrase turns up in Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus. It also appears in Philodemus’s ethical treatise On Anger, which is relevant because Philodemus is the Epicurean writer whose works dominate the Herculaneum library. In an Epicurean context the phrase should refer to good and pleasure.

The ML pipeline

The ink detection is the product of two models, so a pixel counts as ink only where both agree.

• TRACE v3B, a public model from Jashanjot Singh Gill and Nhat Nam Tran.
• A-hn, a custom model fine-tuned by Warner and Bodill from Youssef Nader’s v8-in model, the same base used to find the first letters in PHerc. 1447.

A-hn is the average of three 600-step training runs. Each run was trained half on PHerc. 1447 labels from Nader and half on machine labels made by averaging four public models (v8-in, Reader v3, Reader v2 and TRACE v3B) over other parts of PHerc. 306B. The loss function carried an extra penalty for marking blank papyrus as ink. Warner says he started with “a spare RTX 4090 not doing much.”

The segment itself was built with the VC3D GrowPatch tool on the m7 surface predictions released by the Vesuvius team. The seed point came from a line found by screening windings produced by the public spiral-fitter.

What it unlocks

• The result fixes the orientation of the scroll. PHerc. 306B is the upper section and the smaller PHerc. 306A is the lower, which makes 306A more valuable to scan and virtually unroll.
• 20 more scanned scrolls remain eligible for First Letters Prizes. The community has submitted work on 13 scrolls other than PHerc. 306B and PHerc. 0343, whose prize went to Erwin Nieuwlaar. None has met the bar.
• PHerc. 306B is now a front-runner for the $800,000 Grand Prize, which goes to the first team to virtually unwrap and read 70% of an entire scroll with minimal human input.

The scans were taken at the ESRF in Grenoble, and the scroll is held at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, about 10 km from the villa where it was excavated in the 1750s. The organisers say reliable ink detection on 8-9 µm resolution scans, which are cheaper and more practical to acquire, is what would open up the rest of the collection. Code, the A-hn model and the dataset are public on GitHub and Hugging Face.