On Wednesday, the challenge announced a "historic breakthrough," saying researchers had managed to generate the first image of the inside of one of the three scrolls held at Oxford University's Bodleian Library.
University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales, co-founder of the challenge, said the organisers were "thrilled with the successful imaging of this scroll", saying it "contains more recoverable text than we have ever seen in a scanned Herculaneum scroll".
Hundreds of papyrus scrolls were found in the 1750s in the remains of a lavish villa at the Roman town of Herculaneum, which along with nearby Pompeii was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.
In 2023, several tech executives sponsored the "Vesuvius Challenge" competition, offering cash prizes for efforts to decipher the scrolls with technology.
Peter Toth, a curator at the Bodleian Library, said: "We need better images, and they are very positive and very, very confident that they can still improve the image quality and the legibility of the text.
