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The letters turned out to be part of the Greek word for "purple," making Farritor the first person to glimpse a word of this scroll since it was buried under dozens of feet of volcanic debris.
这些字母原来是希腊语“紫色”一词的部分字母，法里托成为自这个卷轴被埋在数十英尺火山灰下后第一个见到这个卷轴上单词的人。
The scroll was one of about a thousand recovered in the 1700s after well diggers found the villa, which lies beneath the modern town of Ercolano.
这个卷轴是18世纪回收的大约1000个卷轴中的一个，当时挖井工人发现了这座位于现代小镇埃尔科拉诺下的别墅。
Scholars say this trove was likely the Greek library of the Epicurean philosopher and poet Philodemus.
学者们说，这批藏品很可能来自伊壁鸠鲁学派哲学家和诗人菲洛德默斯的希腊语图书馆。
But they suspect a larger Latin library may be in a section of the villa that has yet to be excavated.
但他们怀疑，在尚未挖掘的别墅里，可能有一个更大规模的拉丁语图书馆。
If the competition demonstrates that scholars can read unopened scrolls safely and easily, it could galvanize the search for more historic material.
如果比赛表明，学者们可以安全、轻松地阅读未开封的卷轴，这可能会激发人们对更多历史材料的寻找。
Such a collection might contain lost masterworks of Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and literature.
这些藏品可能包含了希腊和罗马历史、哲学和文学中遗失的名著。
If no more scrolls are discovered, "this will still change our understanding of the ancient world," says Garrett Ryan, a historian and podcaster who studies ancient Greece and Rome.
研究古希腊和罗马的历史学家加勒特·瑞安说，即使没有更多的卷轴被发现，“这仍将改变我们对古代世界的理解”。
But if the library is located, it will be "a profound revolution in the classics."
但如果人们找到图书馆所在，它就将是“古典学领域的一场深刻革命”。
Brent Seales, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge with tech investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
肯塔基大学计算机学教授布伦特·西尔斯与科技投资者纳特·弗里德曼、丹尼尔·格罗斯共同创立了这次维苏威挑战赛。
Seales and his lab did seminal work on ink detection and digital unwrapping that competitors are building upon.
西尔斯和他的实验室在墨迹识别和数字解包方面做了开创性工作，参赛者正是在此基础上继续的。
By launching the contest, they seem to have added more urgency, collective brainpower for this sort of noninvasive historical investigation.
通过发起这场比赛，他们似乎为这种非侵入性历史调查增加了更多的紧迫感、集体智慧。
Farritor's "purple" breakthrough was just the beginning.
法里托在“紫色”一词上的突破只是开始。
To make the most progress possible, Farritor and two other competitors teamed up.
为取得尽可能多的进展，法里托和其他两名参赛者组了队。
They went on to win the grand prize of $700,000 earlier this year for revealing 15 columns of text from the scroll, more than 2,000 characters.
后来，他们在今年早些时候赢得70万美元的大奖，因为他们从卷轴中读出15列文本，超过2000个字符。
Their submission far exceeded the challenge's original goal of reading four passages of 140 characters each.
他们提交的成果远远超过挑战赛最初的目标，即读出四段文本，每段140个字符。
All three were using AI a little differently.
三个人使用人工智能的方法略有不同。
Like Farritor, team leader Youssef Nader, 28, an Egyptian working on his Ph.D. in AI and machine learning in Berlin, focused on improving ink detection.
和法里托一样，28岁的团队负责人优素福·纳德尔--在柏林攻读人工智能和机器学习博士学位的埃及人--专注于提高墨迹识别水平。
Rather than start with a manual inspection of crackle patterns, Nader trained his model on ink found on fragments of damaged scrolls.
纳德尔没有从人工识别裂纹纹理开始，而是用从损坏卷轴的碎片上找到的墨迹来训练他的模型。
He applied the model to sections of a CT scan showing the target scroll's internal structure that the contest organizers had made by placing the scroll in the beam of a particle accelerator.
他将该模型应用于CT扫描的部分，该扫描显示了比赛组织者通过将卷轴放置在粒子加速器的光束中而制作的目标卷轴的内部结构。
Nader's process enabled crisper, more precise renderings of the characters.
纳德尔的工作使得字符的渲染更加清晰、精确。
