By Emilia Randall Students won a competition using AI to decipher never-before-seen passages from the Herculaneum scroll which was almost destroyed by the Vesuvius eruption nearly 2,000 years ago. Winning hundreds of thousands in prize money, three students successfully spent around 20 hours a day training AI to scan the papyrus which would otherwise be destroyed on contact with human hands, as the scroll is charred within an inch of its life. Luke Farritor from Nebraska, Youssef Nader from Egypt and Julian Schilliger, a Swiss robotics student, trained AI to penetrate the layers of scrolls, wh…