Resurrect an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano.

Win Prizes. Make History.

Vesuvius Challenge is a machine learning, computer vision, and geometry competition that is reading the carbonized Herculaneum scrolls without opening them.

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$2,140,000open prize pool $1,800,500already awarded 45scrolls & fragments scanned 1scroll fully read

News — from our Substack

We read an entire scroll →

$60,000 First Title Prize AwardedMay 5 February Prizes and UpdatesMarch 12 New Prizes and Progress UpdateFebruary 27 First Letters Found in New ScrollFebruary 5

Open problems

Virtual Unwrapping

A CT scan yields voxels, not columns: the writing surface must be segmented, meshed, and flattened. The pipeline fails where adjacent sheets are densely packed, or tear. Tracing remains semi-automated. Fully automating it is an open problem.

geometry processing3D computer visionoptimizationC++

Solve it, win$1,000,000 2027 Grand Prize · $590,000 per year in Progress Prizes →Current Path

Ink Detection

Carbon ink is nearly indistinguishable from papyrus in X-ray CT. Models train on fragments with visible ink and infer it inside sealed scrolls; iterative pseudo-labeling bootstraps legibility. Ink has surfaced on 9 of the 45 scanned scrolls and fragments, not always legibly. Generalization is the open problem.

machine learningcomputer visiondomain generalization

Solve it, win$500,000 First Letters · $50,000 PHerc. Paris 4's Title →Find a Letter

Open prizes

Currently open$2,140,000 prize pool

$1,000,0002027 Grand PrizeFully unroll and make readable one of 13 sealed scrolls.1st $800,0002nd $100,0003rd $50,0004th $50,000Deadline June 25th, 2027 $500,000First Letters$50,000 per scroll across the 2027 Grand Prize volumes: uncover 10 letters within a single 4 cm² area.Max 10 scrolls · Deadline June 25th, 2027 $50,000PHerc. Paris 4's TitleDiscover the title of PHerc. Paris 4 (Scroll 1) — any scan, including the 2.4 µm volumes.Deadline June 25th, 2027 $590,000per yearProgress PrizesOpen-ended awards for open source contributions — including $20,000 every month for the best submission.Best of the month $20,000Gold Aureus $20,000Denarius $10,000Sestertius $2,500Papyrus $1,000Awarded monthly

Rules and details

Our story

The backstory79 AD – 2015 AD · how we got here

79 AD

Mount Vesuvius erupts.

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 AD

A farmer discovers the buried villa.

While digging a well, an Italian farmworker encounters a marble pavement. 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.

2015 AD

Dr. Brent Seales pioneers virtual unwrapping.

Using X-ray tomography and computer vision, a team led by Dr. Brent Seales at the University of Kentucky reads the En-Gedi scroll without opening it. Discovered in the Dead Sea region of Israel, the scroll is found to contain text from the book of Leviticus.

Virtual unwrapping has since emerged as a growing field with multiple successes. Their work went on to show the elusive carbon ink of the Herculaneum scrolls can also be detected using X-ray tomography, laying the foundation for Vesuvius Challenge.

2023 AD

A remarkable breakthrough.

Vesuvius Challenge launched in March 2023 with a Grand Prize for the first team to recover four passages of 140 characters from a Herculaneum scroll. Within a year, the prize was claimed. The quest was just beginning.

2026 AD

The first scroll is read.

In 2026, PHerc. 1667 became the first Herculaneum scroll to be virtually unwrapped and read end to end. The challenge now moves onto its next stage: reading multiple entire scrolls.