5 posts tagged “vesuvius”
My data-loader fix just won a $1,000 Vesuvius Challenge Progress Prize
The Vesuvius Challenge's July 2026 Progress Prizes named my Zarr 3 compatibility fix and chunk cache for the Python vesuvius library. Here's what was actually awarded, and why the boring data-plumbing work was worth writing up.
My readability metric found pockets in a sealed scroll. They were shredded.
I tried to turn the best-scoring pockets from my PHerc1203 readability atlas into a readable surface. They were torn. An opposite coherence-first search found a different failure mode: the seven successfully inspected candidates were densely packed. Together, the searches motivate a joint coherence-and-separability test.
I mapped local readability cues inside a sealed Herculaneum scroll
A CPU-only survey of PHerc1203 found that most sampled sites fail a local geometry gate, while a few rare pockets initially looked comparable to known-readable PHerc1667. Follow-up raw-CT inspection showed that the top pockets were torn fragments, clarifying what the metric can and cannot detect.
Why a 2.4 µm Herculaneum scan still reads as noise — and what actually blocks it
I ran the public ink model on a 2.4 µm scan of sealed PHerc1203 and got speckle instead of letters. Chasing why turned up a mistake in my own measurement, corrected it against the community's winding atlas, and left me with something more useful than a failed read: a CPU-only gate that flags rendered windows unlikely to isolate one papyrus sheet — before you spend the GPU.
The same Herculaneum scroll query can fetch 1.3× — or 176× too much data
There is no single best zarr chunk size for reading the Herculaneum scrolls. On one region of Scroll 1, re-chunked five ways and read three ways, read amplification ranged from 1.3× to 176× — same bytes, only the chunk geometry and access pattern changed. I measured it on a laptop, and put the missing chunk cache back on the Python reader while I was there.