The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD severely damaged the papyri of Herculaneum. So much so that scientists feared that the ancient library was lost forever. But with the development of technology, good things happened.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Herculaneum in 79 AD incinerated hundreds of ancient papyri in the library of a villa. The eruption, which appears to have completely destroyed the papyri, also turned the Roman ruins into ash and pumice.

Nearly 2000 years after the explosion, researchers used technology to study the depths of these remains. With the help of artificial intelligence, they read the first word from one of the texts. To speed up the discoveries, University of Kentucky computer scientist Prof Brent Seales and his team launched a competition. The competition offered a cash prize to researchers who could extract legible words from the aged papyri.

To launch the competition, Prof Brent Seales and his team released thousands of three-dimensional X-ray images of two rolled papyrus and three papyrus fragments. They also released an artificial intelligence programme that they trained to read the letters on the papyri based on the subtle changes the ancient ink had made to the papyrus structure.

Luke Farritor and Youssef Nader, two computer science students who took on the Vesuvius challenge, independently found an ancient Greek word in one of the papyri: "πορφύραc", meaning "purple". Farritor, the first to find the word, won $40,000, while Nader won $10,000.

The race is on to read the entire text. Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist from the University of Naples, says that three lines of the papyrus, which contains about 10 letters, are now readable, adding that they expect more to come.

Most of the texts analysed so far are written in ancient Greek, but it is thought that there may also be Latin texts. The fragments revealed letters from Philodemus' Vices and Contrary Virtues and details of Hellenistic dynastic history.

Let's see what else will come out of this library.