In the spring of 2023, as he drove to his SpaceX internship in Starbase, Texas, a college student named Luke Farritor found himself riveted by a podcast. The hosts were describing a competition with an audacious goal: to read a 2,000-year-old scroll without physically unrolling it.

The manuscript was part of a cache of papyrus rolls buried and carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which wiped out the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in A.D. 79. If opened by hand, the scrolls would crumble into pieces, obliterating whatever message they contain. Competitors who found a way to see inside using machine learning could share more than one million dollars in prize money.