Science · Breakthrough
The professor who spent decades chasing an unreadable scroll, then handed the finish to a thousand strangers
Lexington, Kentucky
Brent Seales spent decades building software to read Herculaneum's carbonized scrolls without unrolling them, then handed the last mile to a thousand strangers who finally read one all the way through.
The person and the place
Brent Seales is a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where he holds the Stanley and Karen Pigman Chair of Heritage Science.
The problem he cared about
the Herculaneum scrolls, carbonized when Mount Vesuvius buried the town in 79 AD, hold philosophical texts nobody has read since. Physically unrolling them destroys them. Centuries of attempts already had, leaving only a compact inner core of some scrolls intact. The texts were, in Seales's words, physically preserved but intellectually inaccessible.
The agency moment
Seales spent decades at his EduceLab building software to read the scrolls without opening them: scanning the papyrus, then teaching a model to find the ink no eye could see. In 2023, rather than keep chasing the answer himself, he co-founded the Vesuvius Challenge with Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, and turned his life's problem into an open contest. "What the challenge allowed us to do was to enlist more than a thousand research teams to work on a problem that would normally have about five people working on it," he said.
What changed, with evidence
on June 25, 2026, a team led by papyrologist Federica Nicolardi, working with Seales and the wider Challenge community, announced they had virtually unwrapped and read the entire surviving core of scroll PHerc. 1667, its outer layers destroyed by opening attempts decades and centuries earlier, recovering nearly 1.5 meters of continuous Greek text across 20 columns. It is a philosophical treatise on ethics, likely Stoic, its author still an open question. "This is history," Nicolardi said. "This is completely changing the discipline."
The move worth copying
most of the people who read that scroll started as contestants, not classicists. "Most of the Vesuvius Challenge research team first arrived as contestants." If you have spent years alone with a problem, the move Seales made is the one worth trying: open it up before you finish it. The Challenge is still reading, dozens of scrolls remain. Know someone who's stubborn enough to sit with a hard problem, then generous enough to hand it to strangers? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"Today, we are hearing voices that have been silent for 2,000 years." — Brent Seales, University of Kentucky UKNow
Sources
Here is where this story came from. Go read the originals.
Curated by Good in Progress from the public record.
Sources last verified .
- University of Kentucky UKNow ↗
- National Geographic ↗
- Archaeology Magazine ↗
- Vesuvius Challenge ↗
- UK Research ↗
- arXiv preprint ↗
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