how many scrolls have been scanned so far? what's the main limitation on scan amount?

have any attempts (or just ideas) been made to recreate such charring on known texts?

30 scrolls, maybe? Something like that. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 at Beam line 18 at ESRF back in March.

The team did "the campfire scroll" experiment a few years ago to replicate carbonization, unrolling, and ink detection. That is the only case I am aware of. It proved the method could work but it's not a source of say training data; it varies too much from the real scrolls.

The main limitation is time and cost. We have to scan on what is AFAIK the most powerful x-ray beam line in the world. It is not cheap

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CGMthrowaway 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You had to pay? I understand the machine cost many hundreds of millions of dollars, but I would have thought for academic researchers doing open science, the beamtime is free (funded by the govt / science trusts).

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verditelabs 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The beam time is unfortunately not free. I scanned Pherc Paris 4 and Pherc Paris 3 in March and had the final shift on the beam. As I was removing the scroll from the scanning pedestal the next team of scientists were already in the lab getting their samples ready. It's a well oiled machine and they've got customers.

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larkost 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The way these things normally work is that the project starts with some sort of a grant. Then that grant pays for all of the costs of the project: peoples' salary, materials used, time on equipment, plus money for the buildings and administration (overhead).

In this case the time on the equipment would need to be included, both a portion of the cost of building/maintaining it, and probably the energy needed to run it. Even where the government is providing the grant (likely here), it still needs to be accounted for.

	▲	verditelabs 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		We - the core challenge team anyway - get no money from any government. We paid for the beam time from our donations and internal funding.