But at the same time: scanning tech & software automation just keep getting better, including via spillovers from other unrelated projects.
The ability of an ML system to learn to mimic what the manual "virtual unrolling" process is doing, from a small number of examples-to-follow, is growing.
Each bit of success, once confirmed by other experts or correlation with other texts, improves the training data.
Eventually a fully-software pushbutton pipeline of "raw imaging to likely texts" should be possible.
And if, say, some of the scrolls are sufficiently 'read' nondestructively to embolden teams to risk destructive techniques – such as incremental ablation while reading the exact chemicals at every coordinate – even higher-resolution data could become available.
The ability of an ML system to learn to mimic what the manual "virtual unrolling" process is doing, from a small number of examples-to-follow, is growing.
Each bit of success, once confirmed by other experts or correlation with other texts, improves the training data.
Eventually a fully-software pushbutton pipeline of "raw imaging to likely texts" should be possible.
And if, say, some of the scrolls are sufficiently 'read' nondestructively to embolden teams to risk destructive techniques – such as incremental ablation while reading the exact chemicals at every coordinate – even higher-resolution data could become available.