“That is until Luke Farritor, a contestant of the Vesuvius Challenge, became the first person in two millennia to see an entire word from within an unopened scroll this August.”
The Herculaneum scrolls were carbonized in 79 AD and crumble if you try to open them. A 21-year-old student read a full word inside one using CT scans and machine learning and took a $40,000 prize. Youssef Nader found the same word independently for $10,000. EduceLab had the CT scans since 2019. Open data and prize money got a word out of them five months after the contest launched.