3 posts tagged “vesuvius”
I measured where a sealed Herculaneum scroll is most likely to be readable — before anyone segments it
A CPU-only readability survey of PHerc1203 found that most of the sealed scroll is geometrically unreadable today — but a few rare pockets look comparable to known-readable PHerc1667. Calibrated against a scroll already read end-to-end, it's a map of where segmentation is worth attempting first.
Why the finest-scanned Herculaneum scroll still reads as noise — and what actually blocks it
I ran the public ink model on PHerc1203, the finest-scanned unopened Herculaneum scroll, 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 predicts whether a rendered surface can yield ink at all — before you spend the GPU.
The best chunk size for a Herculaneum scroll is 1.3× — or 176×
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.