This might be one of the first "awesome for humanity" uses for AI On epicureanism as food and music and hedonism though, we now have foods and music and every kind of pleasure that blows Roman...
This might be one of the first "awesome for humanity" uses for AI
On epicureanism as food and music and hedonism though, we now have foods and music and every kind of pleasure that blows Roman emperors' experiences out of the water on any given Monday, and yet we're more miserable than ever.
When we say ... that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice or wilful misrepresentation. By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not by an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not by sexual lust, nor the enjoyment of fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul. — Epicurus, "Letter to Menoeceus"
(From Wikipedia)
That sounds much more reasonable.
Going to be amazing to be able to read more of these scrolls
Objection: There have been plenty of such use cases, however it’s just the case that the general public outside of "sciencey" circles, for the most part, did not and does not really care about...
Exemplary
This might be one of the first "awesome for humanity" uses for AI
Objection: There have been plenty of such use cases, however it’s just the case that the general public outside of "sciencey" circles, for the most part, did not and does not really care about forms and applications of AI which they cannot talk to themselves.
Some examples, chronologically from oldest to most recent:
Go (the Asian board game) AI beating the best human players in 2016 [1]
IBM’s Project debater was first demonstrated in 2018 [2]
AlphaFold in 2019 – this one’s story is really really crazy [3]: How proteins fold is (was?) one of the biggest unsolved things in medicine/biology, and AlphaFold in its first iteration already beat out all "manual labor" approaches of competition, and in the next iterations, basically single-handedly removed decades of work ahead of science in one fell swoop. These results can now be used to research e.g. how molecular "ingredients" in new medications will interact, where and how exactly they are likely to dock in human receptors, etc. in so many medicinal fields, all of which would’ve previously been utterly impossible, to the point where it’s hard to describe just how impossible.
Ancient cuneiform text translation [4]: The AI was better than the (already very small) circle of human experts in a matter of not-an-expert’s-lifetime worth of training in 2020
Breast Cancer detection in image scans in 2023 [5]
[1] Digital intuition. A computer program that can outplay humans in the abstract game of Go will redefine our relationship with machines, in Nature; this is about AlphaGo (Wikipedia)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Debater
[3] AlphaFold at CASP13 in Bioinformatics 35; see also Wikipedia
[4] Reading Akkadian cuneiform using natural language processing (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240511); furthermore: Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks, in Nature (2022)
[5] FabNet: A Features Agglomeration-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Multiscale Breast Cancer Histopathology Images Classification in Cancers: 1013 (https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers15041013)
I did not know the appropriate sub (what is it called here?) to post this. I think comp is appropriate, also history. I am more interested in the technical side of it, so I decided to post on...
I did not know the appropriate sub (what is it called here?) to post this. I think comp is appropriate, also history. I am more interested in the technical side of it, so I decided to post on ~comp instead.
I read a summary of this in local news but did not know how involved the process was! I love the challenge and prize! What a great project! An interesting take: The scrolls are severely burnt but...
I read a summary of this in local news but did not know how involved the process was! I love the challenge and prize! What a great project!
An interesting take: The scrolls are severely burnt but in that process, they were also preserved! Otherwise, the material would likely have decomposed by now.
This was really fascinating, thanks for sharing! Absolutely wild to look at the image of one of the scrolls and see how they are able to extract text from it.
This was really fascinating, thanks for sharing! Absolutely wild to look at the image of one of the scrolls and see how they are able to extract text from it.
On a side note, if you ever visit Pompeii, go to Herculaneum as well. The house where they found the scrolls is not open to the public yet, but the town is preserved better than Pompeii. There is...
On a side note, if you ever visit Pompeii, go to Herculaneum as well. The house where they found the scrolls is not open to the public yet, but the town is preserved better than Pompeii. There is also a really good pizzeria nearby (it’s called Ro.Vi).
A tour of the underground theater is also worth it. It’s kind of the birthplace of archeology.
That was fascinating, thanks for posting it. There’s something really exciting about uncovering new cultural information from antiquity that was believed lost. It says in the 2024 goal section...
That was fascinating, thanks for posting it. There’s something really exciting about uncovering new cultural information from antiquity that was believed lost. It says in the 2024 goal section that they are hoping to apply this technique to many other scrolls containing an estimated 16 MB of text. It would be so cool if they uncovered some history texts that shed light on what the Romans knew about their forebears.
As an aside, I would’ve found it darkly hilarious if they were investing all this effort on trying to read papyrus scrolls that were actually blank the whole time.
Wow that was an amazing read, well-worth reading it all in spite of the length. I can't wait to learn about what these guys uncover as they progress through the rest of the library!
Wow that was an amazing read, well-worth reading it all in spite of the length. I can't wait to learn about what these guys uncover as they progress through the rest of the library!
This might be one of the first "awesome for humanity" uses for AI
On epicureanism as food and music and hedonism though, we now have foods and music and every kind of pleasure that blows Roman emperors' experiences out of the water on any given Monday, and yet we're more miserable than ever.
(From Wikipedia)
That sounds much more reasonable.
Going to be amazing to be able to read more of these scrolls
Objection: There have been plenty of such use cases, however it’s just the case that the general public outside of "sciencey" circles, for the most part, did not and does not really care about forms and applications of AI which they cannot talk to themselves.
Some examples, chronologically from oldest to most recent:
[1] Digital intuition. A computer program that can outplay humans in the abstract game of Go will redefine our relationship with machines, in Nature; this is about AlphaGo (Wikipedia)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Debater
[3] AlphaFold at CASP13 in Bioinformatics 35; see also Wikipedia
[4] Reading Akkadian cuneiform using natural language processing (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240511); furthermore: Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks, in Nature (2022)
[5] FabNet: A Features Agglomeration-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Multiscale Breast Cancer Histopathology Images Classification in Cancers: 1013 (https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers15041013)
I did not know the appropriate sub (what is it called here?) to post this. I think comp is appropriate, also history. I am more interested in the technical side of it, so I decided to post on ~comp instead.
It would be called "tilde", I would think :-)
I read a summary of this in local news but did not know how involved the process was! I love the challenge and prize! What a great project!
An interesting take: The scrolls are severely burnt but in that process, they were also preserved! Otherwise, the material would likely have decomposed by now.
This was really fascinating, thanks for sharing! Absolutely wild to look at the image of one of the scrolls and see how they are able to extract text from it.
On a side note, if you ever visit Pompeii, go to Herculaneum as well. The house where they found the scrolls is not open to the public yet, but the town is preserved better than Pompeii. There is also a really good pizzeria nearby (it’s called Ro.Vi).
A tour of the underground theater is also worth it. It’s kind of the birthplace of archeology.
That was fascinating, thanks for posting it. There’s something really exciting about uncovering new cultural information from antiquity that was believed lost. It says in the 2024 goal section that they are hoping to apply this technique to many other scrolls containing an estimated 16 MB of text. It would be so cool if they uncovered some history texts that shed light on what the Romans knew about their forebears.
As an aside, I would’ve found it darkly hilarious if they were investing all this effort on trying to read papyrus scrolls that were actually blank the whole time.
Wow that was an amazing read, well-worth reading it all in spite of the length. I can't wait to learn about what these guys uncover as they progress through the rest of the library!