Want to take home up to $1 million? All you need to do is read four ancient passages, each one only about the length of a tweet—without opening the scrolls they’re written on. This is the challenge posed by a group of classicists, papyrologists and technical experts: the Vesuvius Challenge, to be precise.

Led by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, the team hopes to crowdsource the best ways to use artificial intelligence to read the Herculaneum scrolls, texts that were buried 2,000 years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.