November 27, 2023

Luke Farritor works to decipher more of the scroll texts from his computers in his Kauffman Residence Hall room. He has set up a workstation on a table inside the door to the suite with his computer stored in a closet. Farritor, a senior in the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Engineering, recently won a global contest to read the first text inside a carbonized scroll from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. That text had been unreadable since the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Farritor developed a machine-learning algorithm that detected the Greek word πορϕυρας (purple) on the charred papyrus scroll, which is too delicate to unroll using MRI scans. November 27, 2023. Photo by Craig Chandler / University Communication and Marketing.