An undergraduate student used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 and AI to decipher a word in one of the Herculaneum scrolls to win a $40,000 prize (via Nvidia). Herculaneum was covered in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls are one of the site's most famous artifacts. The scrolls have been notoriously hard to decipher, but machine learning might be the key.
Today, x-raying is the method of choice to read ancient scrolls without opening them and potentially causing damage. However, the ink in the Herculaneum scrolls is carbon-based, making it very difficult to distinguish from the charred pages of the scroll itself using normal X-rays.
