Today's age full of modern technology is absolutely incredible. Evidence can be found in a recent effort by an IT student from the University of Nebraska, who managed to decipher a 2000-year-old scroll using the performance of an Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card released in 2016. In a truly fascinating way.
Deciphering old writings is often a challenge in itself. However, in the case of the scroll that was "subdued", it went even further. That's because it was a scroll that miraculously survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. However, the word "survived" may be used incorrectly here. Because it suffered a lot of damage in the eruption, which makes it completely impossible to unfold, making it look more like feces than a scroll with a record of anything. However, today's science is so advanced that with the help of very sensitive scans, it was possible to "disassemble" the scroll into the smallest details, from which machine learning running on the Nvidia GTX 1070 graphics card was able to put together what was written on the scroll.
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Since the “decryption” of the scroll was part of the Vesuvius Challenge, which aims to decipher as many of these destroyed scrolls as possible and thereby enrich the world with information from that time, this success did not come without a corresponding reward. The student earned a handsome $40 for his feat, which is about 000 CZK. However, this is nothing compared to the main prize of $902, which is still waiting for its owner. However, it is not surprising. In order to win it, someone would have to decipher even more destroyed scrolls with a different type of ink in them, and in addition, in the range of at least 000 characters of continuous text miniat least on four passages of the given scrolls. But who knows, maybe someone will actually succeed in doing so in the near future.
And what was on that scroll?
I was also waiting for what was written there 😁
The GTX 1070 is not exactly an antediluvian card (released in 2016). And it certainly has decent performance. Three years ago I started with Topaz Video Enhancer, with GTX 1060 6GB, and it was still usable in FHD. In SOTR, it was possible to use RT on it, and the game was still playable in FHD (24-30 FPS). It's been serving as a secondary computer for a year now, but I still wouldn't write it off. And the GTX 1060 has 3/4 the performance of the GTX 1070.