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In the spring of 2023, as he drove to his SpaceX internship in Starbase, Texas, a college student named Luke Farritor found himself riveted by a podcast.
2023年春天，一位名叫卢克·法里托的大学生开车去德克萨斯州星际基地的SpaceX实习时，被一个播客节目深深吸引了。
The hosts were describing a competition with an audacious goal: to read a 2,000-year-old scroll without physically unrolling it.
播客主持人正在描述一个目标十分大胆的比赛：在不展开卷轴的情况下读出一个有着2000年历史的卷轴上的文字。
The manuscript was part of a cache of papyrus rolls buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which wiped out the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in A.D. 79.
这份手稿是一批纸莎草卷轴的一部分，这些卷轴在维苏威火山喷发后被埋藏并已碳化，公元79年的这次火山喷发摧毁了罗马城市庞贝和赫库兰尼姆。
If opened by hand, the scrolls would crumble into pieces, obliterating whatever message they contain.
假如手工打开这些卷轴，它们就会碎成渣渣，卷轴上所包含的任何信息便会灰飞烟灭。
Competitors who found a way to see inside using machine learning could share more than one million dollars in prize money.
利用机器学习找到阅读卷轴文字方法的参赛者可以分享超过100万美元的奖金。
"I was like, Holy cow, I have to work on this," says Farritor, now 22. "A lot of things about it were really compelling, the biggest one being that you're going to potentially discover a new library from the ancient world, and that's a big deal."
现年22岁的法里托说：“我当时就想，天哪，我必须参与这个项目。这件事有很多吸引人的地方，最吸引人之处在于你有可能会发现一个来自古代世界的新图书馆，这可是一件了不起的事。”
While he focused on space travel in his day job, Farritor, a computer science major, devoted his nights and weekends to the Vesuvius Challenge -- something akin to time travel.
主修计算机科学的法里托，把自己的每个夜晚和周末都投入到维苏威挑战赛中--这有点像时间旅行。
What did this scroll, from a Herculaneum villa believed to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, have to say?
这份来自赫库兰尼姆别墅的卷轴据信曾属于凯撒大帝的岳父，它究竟说了些什么呢？
To find out, contestants would have to develop their own programs that could interpret existing 3D scans of the coiled scroll and chart subtle physical variations to detect writing on the charred material.
为找出答案，参赛者必须开发自己的程序，解释卷轴的3D扫描图，描绘出微妙的物理变化，识别烧焦材料上的文字。
Farritor first studied CT scans of sections where the carbon-based ink was imperceptible against the carbonized papyrus.
法里托首先研究了CT扫描图像中的部分区域，但在这些区域中，碳基墨迹在碳化的纸莎草上难以识别。
Another competitor in the contest, which rewarded participants with cash prizes for sharing early results, had observed "crackle" patterns resembling dried mud but which could indicate the presence of ink.
另一名参赛者--该比赛为分享早期结果的参与者提供现金奖励—-观察到类似干泥的“裂纹”模式，这可能表明墨水的存在。
So Farritor trained a machine learning model to home in on the crackle texture.
于是法里托训练了一个机器学习模型，专注于研究裂纹纹理。
Late one Saturday night, back at the University of Nebraska, Farritor got word that a new section of the scroll had been uploaded for competitors.
一个周六的深夜，回到内布拉斯加大学的法里托得知，卷轴的一个新部分已经上传给参赛者。
He was at a party, so he used his phone to log on to his desktop and put his AI model to work on the fresh image.
他当时在参加派对，他用手机登录到桌面并让他训练的人工智能模型处理新图像。
A few hours later he checked his phone and saw the Greek letters pi, omicron, and rho glimmering at him from across the millennia.
几小时后他查看手机，突然看到跨越千年时光的希腊字母π、ο和ρ在向他闪烁。
"Realizing, Wow, I just automatically discovered three new letters of writing from the Roman Empire, that was a pretty cool moment," Farritor says. "I freaked out; everyone else freaked out. I sent it to the organizers. I sent it to my mom."
法里托说：“我意识到，天哪，我刚刚发现了来自罗马帝国的三个新字母，那是一个多么酷的时刻。我惊呆了。其他人也惊呆了。我把它发给了组织方。我还把它发给了我的妈妈。”
