Headline, April 23 2024/ ''' A.I'S -STUDIOUS - AIR '''

''' A.I'S - STUDIOUS -

 AIR '''

! IN MOST RESPECTFUL MEMORIAM ! : The World Students Society's module of '' Trust and Safety '' for Proud Pakistan, is henceforth named after the precious mother of Engineer Founder Framer Haleema Zia. 

'' CAN FOUNDERS SOAR ? '' Engineers Rabo - computer science and Haleema Zia, Telcom, both from NUST, brought great elegance, sacrifices, focus and genius to the endeavours and struggles of !WOW!. And to that I add that they were my first professors beyond the hype. I remain eternally grateful.

UNROLLED AT LAST : THE OBJECT KNOWN AS - P. Herc. Paris. 3 resembles a dark grey lump of charcoal, about the size and shape of a banana. That explains its nickname : Banana Boy.

It is in fact a papyrus scroll, found in the ruins of a villa in the Roman town of Herculaneum, in Campania.

Along with hundreds of other scrolls in the villa's library. It was carbonised when scorching gases engulfed the town during the same eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in 79 AD, that also buried the nearby town of Pompeii. 

Although the scrolls survived, their charring means that unrolling them is almost impossible. Now, nearly 2000 years later, words from inside Banana Boy have been revealed for the first time, after volunteers competing in a prize challenge used x-rays and artificial intelligence to do the unrolling virtually.

The first word to be found, announced on October 12th, was ''porphyras'', which means '' purple '' in ancient Greek. It was uncovered by Luke Farritor, a computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, earning him a $40,000 prize.

Student Farritor built on work by Casey Handmer, a former NASA physicist, whose examination of X-ray images of Banana Boy's charred layers identified a characteristic '' crackle pattern '' indicating the presence of ink.

Scroll up : The same word was later found by Youssef Nader, a robotics student at the Free University of Berlin. [ Dr. Handmer and Mr. Nader both received $10,000 prizes.] Mr. Nader has since produced an image from the scrolling showing four columns of text, side by side. For classicists, this is heady stuff.

The villa in question is thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Pio, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

The ability to read its well-stocked library could significantly expand the number of texts that have survived from antiquity. Already there is excited speculation about forgotten plays, new works of philosophy - or even lost Homeric poems.

Efforts to read the scrolls began in the 1750s, when the villa was rediscovered. An attempt to unpick them with knives caused them to disintegrate. Recognising their fragility, Antonio Piaggio, a conservator from the Vatican, built a machine in 1754 to unroll them slowly, using weights on strings.

Even then, the unrolled scrolls fell to pieces. And the resulting fragments were almost impossible to read : charcoal based ink is hard to see  against the shiny black of charred papyrus. 

But the few characters that could be read revealed some scrolls to be philosophical works written in ancient Greek.

A quarter of a millennium later, in 1999, scientists from Brigham Young University illuminated some of those fragments with infrared light. That created a strong contrast between papyrus and ink, making the writing more legible.

Multi-spectral imaging in 2008, combining many wavelengths of light, was even better, revealing previously unreadable words. Many fragments turned out to belong to texts written by a Greek philosopher called Philodemus of Gadara.

Until then, they had been known only from mention in other works. [ Cicero, though, was a fan of his poetry.]

Around 500 scrolls remain unopened. Given the damage it does, physical unrolling is no longer attempted. Instead the focus has shifted towards finding ways to unwrap them virtually, by using 3D scans of the rolled-up scrolls to produce a series of legible 2D images.

The pioneer of this approach is W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Artificial Intelligence, AI, archaeology, and the unearthing and understanding of a trove of lost classical texts continues. The World Students Society thanks The Economist.

With most loving and respectful dedication to Engineer and Founder Haleema Zia, NUST, and then Global Founder Framers, and then Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See Ya all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world - and for every subject : wsscow.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless