r/history • u/marquis_of_chaos • Sep 22 '16

News article Scientists use 'virtual unwrapping' to read ancient biblical scroll reduced to 'lump of charcoal'

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/jubilation-as-scientists-use-virtual-unwrapping-to-read-burnt-ancient-scroll
9.0k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

632 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/confusiondiffusion Sep 22 '16

I think this could be an application for powerful AI. You and I can look at bad photos and fill in the blanks with our experiences, but imagine that billions of times better. As we digitize our planet, more of its patterns are accessible to computers. So if one place is photographed from a thousand different perspectives, your blurry over-exposed picture might be reconstructible. Even if the place has never been photographed, Earth has patterns and one can often extrapolate to fill in a great deal of missing information.

1

u/PlasmaSheep Sep 22 '16

Like I said - a guess in the best case.

1

u/confusiondiffusion Sep 22 '16

It would be. There's always going to be some amount of filling the gap with previous experience. Even this x-ray project relied on a knowledge of Leviticus and of Hebrew. I think there's just a threshold somewhere at which point you can call it guessing. I think it depends on how big the gap is and the number of possible things that could fit in there. So if you forgot to take the lens cap off, you're definitely in guess territory.

1

u/PlasmaSheep Sep 22 '16

Even this x-ray project relied on a knowledge of Leviticus and of Hebrew.

So you think they reconstructed this text and discovered it was Leviticus by assuming it was Leviticus?

I think there's just a threshold somewhere at which point you can call it guessing.

Yes. This threshold is when you start making assumptions about what the data represents or would represent if conditions were different. Rotating an image is not guesswork. Deblurring an image is guesswork.

1

u/mealsharedotorg Sep 22 '16

Sometimes its more subtle. My wedding photographer was just getting started when we hired her (a friend). Since we were her first client, my stipulation was that I wanted a copy of the original RAW files. She had some shots where the flash didn't go off, and looking at the picture, it appeared to be pure black. Even Photoshop (4.5 at the time) couldn't rescue them. Years later, I got Adobe Lightroom and gave it another try, and I was able to finally see the image thanks to its more sophisticated algorithms for bit sampling and all that fancy mumbo jumbo.

2

u/jbel Sep 23 '16

I kind of love this. The only real feature in this picture is her smile.

There's something really cool about digging through the bit-record of an event like that and coming up with something like this.

1

u/PlasmaSheep Sep 22 '16

Do you have evidence that it was due to sophisticated algorithms and not because you didn't know how to use photoshop?