When competing in something entitled, “Vesuvius Challenge,” it’s difficult to imagine it being an easy contest let alone a winnable one but it’s what Luke Farritor did while earning a $40,000 First Letters Prize for uncovering eight cryptic letters that spelled the Greek word for “purple.”
Part of a $700,000 grand prize available to anyone who can recover four text passages – at least 140 characters in length, the First Letters Prize set aside $40,000 for anyone who uncovered a single word of the scroll, which Farritor was able to do after he developed a handmade machine-learning model algorithm using artificial intelligence. Farritor is a 21-year-old senior majoring in computer science at UNL and has gained quite the notoriety since being awarded the First Letters Prize in October. His achievement made headlines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Popular Science, National Geographic and even the BBC.
The word Farritor helped decipher is part of an ancient scroll recovered from the ashes of Mount Vesuvius, a volcano that erupted in the autumn of 79 (A.D.) and laid waste to several Italian communities, including Pompeii and Herculaneum. These Herculaneum papyri were recovered in the 18th century beneath 20 meters of volcanic ash and mud, and far from preserved. Scholars and scientists have been trying to interpret the scrolls, offering up monetary prizes like the Vesuvius Challenge and First Letters Prize, since they have gone unread for nearly three centuries because of their delicate condition as the result of age and exposure to unprecedented elements.
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