This is a linkpost for https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/metascience-of-the-vesuvius-challenge

The Vesuvius Challenge is a million+ dollar contest to read 2,000 year old text from charcoal-papyri using particle accelerators and machine learning. The scrolls come from the ancient villa town of Herculaneum, nearby Pompeii, which was similarly buried and preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. The prize fund comes from tech entrepreneurs and investors Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and several other donors.

From this

In the 9 months after the prize was announced, thousands of researchers and students worked on the problem, decades-long technical challenges were solved, and the amount of recovered text increased from one or two splotchy characters to 15 columns of clear text with more than 2000 characters.

To this

The success of the Vesuvius Challenge validates the motivating insight of metascience: It's not about how much we spend, it's about how we spend it.

Most debate over science funding concerns a [...]

---

First published:
March 30th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/boWGNiQ3oemiKgDw7/metascience-of-the-vesuvius-challenge

Linkpost URL:
https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/metascience-of-the-vesuvius-challenge

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

[Linkpost] “Metascience of the Vesuvius Challenge” by Maxwell Tabarrok

LessWrong (30+ Karma)