在2024年世界学者杯第17期WSC Weekly栏目中，我们与小学者们认识了一群生活在网络世界之外的年轻人，了解了“卢德主义”。在上期的Quiz中，你是否找到了正确答案？现在就让我们一起来揭晓吧！
点此查看上期话题
断网俱乐部，正成为年轻人的新潮流？
The Luddite club is gaining popularity among young people
上期答案：
A member of the Luddite club is most likely to agree with the following statements? 卢德派俱乐部的成员最有可能同意以下哪一项观点？
A. The advancement of technologies brings more harm than good 科技发展弊大于利
B. Social media is bad for mental health 社交媒体不利于心理健康
C. Technologies take jobs from humans 技术抢走人类的工作
D. Artificial Intelligence threatens the traditional lives人工智能威胁传统生活方式
E. All schools should ban the use of mobile phone. 所有学校应该禁止使用手机
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2024 WSC Weekly· 18期
古书毁了不要紧，AI还能帮破译？
How can AI help decode damaged ancient scrolls？
公元 79 年维苏威火山爆发时，大量火山物质掩埋了那不勒斯湾的多个城市，其中包括庞贝附近的赫库兰尼姆。在赫库兰尼姆，20 米高的热泥浆和火山灰掩埋了一座巨大的别墅，该别墅曾为凯撒大帝的岳父所有。里面有一个藏有大量纸莎草纸卷轴的图书馆。卷轴被火山碎屑的热量碳化。但它们也被保存了下来。几个世纪以来，几乎所有暴露在空气中的古籍都腐烂和消失了，而纸莎草卷图书馆却完好无损地等待在地下。
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, it buried various cities at the Gulf of Naples under massive volcanic material – including Herculaneum, located near Pompeii. In Herculaneum, twenty meters of hot mud and ash bury an enormous villa once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Inside, there is a vast library of papyrus scrolls. The scrolls are carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris. But they are also preserved. For centuries, as virtually every ancient text exposed to the air decays and disappears, the library of the Villa of the Papyri waits underground, intact.
1750 年，一位意大利农工在挖井时发现了一块大理石路面。经过发掘，精美的雕像和壁画以及数以百计的卷轴被发现。这些卷轴已经碳化，呈灰烬状，非常脆弱。但是，打开它们的诱惑是巨大的。如果能够阅读这些卷轴，它们将大大增加我们所拥有的古代文学作品的数量。早期打开卷轴的尝试不幸毁坏了许多卷轴。一位修道士历经数十年煞费苦心地打开了其中的几卷，发现其中包含用希腊文书写的哲学文本。六百多个卷轴仍未打开，无法阅读。
In 1750, an Italian farmworker encounters a marble pavement while digging a well. Excavations unearth beautiful statues and frescoes – and hundreds of scrolls. Carbonized and ashen, they are extremely fragile. But the temptation to open them is great; if read, they would significantly increase the corpus of literature we have from antiquity. Early attempts to open the scrolls unfortunately destroy many of them. A few are painstakingly unrolled by a monk over several decades, and they are found to contain philosophical texts written in Greek. More than six hundred remain unopened and unreadable.
2007年，肯塔基大学计算机科学家布伦特·西尔斯（Brent Seales）提出了在不打开卷轴的条件下阅读赫库兰尼姆纸莎草纸的计划。他在这个问题上研究了大约 15 年。西尔斯认为，从碳化纸莎草纸背景中辨别碳墨的关键在于人工智能。最初的实验证实了他的假设，即人工智能可以帮助从 CT 扫描中恢复难以识别的墨迹，但要揭开卷轴的秘密仍面临巨大挑战。硅谷企业家纳特·弗里德曼（Nat Friedman）看到了西尔斯的工作，提出发起一个开源人工智能挑战赛，以加快进度。弗里德曼承诺向最终能够破解卷轴的个人或团队颁发若干奖项，其中包括 100 万美元的奖金。这个比赛被命名为“维苏威挑战”。
The plan for noninvasive reading of the Herculaneum papyri was first pursued by University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales in 2007. He worked on the problem for about 15 years. But while he succeeded with other scrolls, the Herculaneum papyri proved very tricky. Seales recognised that the key to discerning the carbon ink from the carbonised papyrus background was AI. Initial experiments confirmed his hypothesis that AI could help recover the elusive ink from the CT scans, but significant challenges remained to unlock the secrets of the scrolls. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Nat Friedman came across Seales’s work and suggested they establish an open-source AI challenge to accelerate the progress. Several prizes, including one of USD$1 million were promised to people or teams who could finally crack the scrolls. This is the Vesuvius Challenge.
自2023年3月以来，已有1000多个团队参加了维苏威挑战。2024年2月，第一批奖金获得者被宣布，获奖的团队由机器学习专业的三位学生组成：德国的优素福·纳德（Youssef Nader）、美国的卢克·法里托尔（Luke Farritor）和瑞士的朱利安·施利格（Julian Schilliger）。他们所创造的人工智能模型成功地揭示了其中一个卷轴最内层 15 列的部分内容。这是一篇可能由伊壁鸠鲁派哲学家菲洛德摩斯所写的关于伦理学的文章。他们使用了一种被称为 “虚拟展开”的技术：首先，使用与 CT 扫描相同的技术，即 X 射线断层扫描技术，对卷轴进行 3D 扫描。其次，分析扫描结果，找出卷轴的层次，并将这些层次虚拟扁平化，以便在压平的卷轴层中寻找墨迹。然后，团队再根据通过目测分离出的独特图案，在纸莎草纸上训练用于墨迹检测的人工智能模型。尽管还存在一些技术上的困难，但在不久的将来，许多其他未打开的卷轴应该也可以使用这种方法虚拟展开。
Since March 2023, more than 1,000 teams have entered the Vesuvius Challenge. In February 2024, the first winners of the prize money – machine learning students Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland. Their AI model spectacularly revealed parts of 15 columns from the innermost part of one of the scrolls. It was a text on ethics, probably written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. This “virtual unrolling” technique starts by scanning the carbonised scroll in a particle accelerator at super-high resolution. First, take a 3D scan of the scroll using x-ray tomography, the same technology as that used for a CT scan. Second, analyze the scan to find the layers of scroll, and virtually flatten out the layers and look for signs of ink in the flattened layers.
这一突破促进了维苏威挑战赛第二阶段的资助。亿万富翁埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）在其社交媒体平台 X（前身为 Twitter）上表示，他打算通过名下的慈善组织马斯克基金会（Musk Foundation）为维苏威挑战赛提供资金支持。比赛的下一个目标是扫描更多的卷轴，并加快和规范虚拟展开过程。在未来几年内，将可能有数十份新的希腊文和拉丁文古卷轴得到破译。
This breakthrough facilitated the funding of phase two of the Vesuvius Challenge. he billionaire Elon Musk said on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, that he intends to support the project through his charitable organisation, the Musk Foundation. The next objective is to scan more scrolls and to accelerate and standardise the virtual unrolling process. It is highly possible that dozens of new ancient Greek and Latin texts will emerge over the next few years.
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Quiz 题目：
The task of Vesuvius Challenge is most similar to which of the following
维苏威挑战赛的任务与以下哪项最相似
A. Translating a latin text into English 将一段拉丁文文本翻译成英文
B. Reading a diary without opening it 在不打开一本日记的情况下阅读它
C. Turning a paragraph of texts into a picture 把一段文字变成一张图片
D. Creating a simulation for a palace that is burnt down 模拟一座被烧毁的宫殿
E. Replicating a painting that is ruined 复制一幅被毁的画
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2024世界学者杯
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2024 WSC Regional Round
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2024世界学者杯
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