Reading Scrolls Carbonized in Ancient Vesuvius Eruption without Unwrapping

PC's newsfeed made me aware of deciphering of text on carbonized ancient scrolls without unwrapping (NBC News). (This "deciphering" has nothing to do with cryptography.)
A whole library of an ancient villa survived centuries under the earth, carbonized by the heat of the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which engulfed Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the villa was located. The library contained more than 1800 papyrus scrolls, of which some were presented to Britain and France in the nineteenth century (Wikipedia).

Early attemps to read the content were a destructive study, breaking the carbonized scrolls into pieces ("The Library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum", reviewing David Sider (2005), The library of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum; "Twelve Books at Herculaneum That Could Change History" by Richard Carrier).
In 2011, Brent Seales et al. reported "virtual unrolling" of a Herculaneum scroll (Brent Seales et al., "Analysis of Herculaneum Papyri with X-ray Computed Tomography" (NDT, Semantic Scholar)). Virtual unrolling or virtual unwrapping is a non-destructive modality and begins by scanning a scroll with X-ray tomography (as in a CT scan) to produce a 3D volumetric image of the scroll, in which single layers are identified by intensive manual labour ("segmentation"). Once layers are segmented, they can be mapped onto planar images.
At this stage, Seales could not detect any text because carbon-based ink could not be contrasted from carbonized papyrus with his X-ray scan. In 2016, Seales succeeded in revealing text of a scroll found at En-Gedi, Israel, that had been charred in a fire, in which the ink contained lead readily identifiable with X-rays.
Detection of carbon-based ink was achieved by using X-ray phase-contrast tomography, whereby a slight difference in thickness caused by the presence of ink can be detected in phase difference of X-rays. With this method, successful decoding of some fragments of two Herculaneum scrolls (PHerc. 375 and PHerc. 495) was reported in 2016 (Bukreeva et al. (2016), "Virtual unrolling and deciphering of Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast tomography" (Scientific Reports), Stabile et al. (2021), "A computational platform for the virtual unfolding of Herculaneum Papyri" (NIH)).
Seales' team adopted an approach that combines scanning with high-energy X-rays with identifying ink by machine learning trained with image data with visible text in ink (The Guardian).
Seales' work inspired the Vesuvius Challenge, launched in March 2023 by Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales. It offered a Grand Prize for recovering 4 passages of 140 characters as well as smaller prizes for contributions on the way. It was reccognized that the task was not easy, and the organizers hired a segmentation team to manually identify and label the papyrus surface in the volumetric data (PHerc.Paris. 4) and provide the flattened segments as an open source. It led to discovery of "the first directly visible evidence of ink and letters" by Casey Handmer (his blog) and close collaboration between the in-house segmenters and contestants drove the work (Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded).
In October 2023, Luke Farritor won First Letters Prize, a progress prize that required finding at least 10 letters in a 4 cm² area. He used machine learning to find ink patterns. Detected patterns were fed back for training the machine learning model, which thereby learned to detect letters that cannot be recognized with his eyes. In his discovery, papyrologists on the organizing team could immediately recognize a word "porphyras" (First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by 21yo computer science student). Youssef Nader won a second-place prize for independently finding the same word shortly later.
In February 2024, the Grand Prize was awarded to a team of Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger. They achieved much more than required for the prize, revealing more than 2000 characters in total.
Still, about 95% of the scroll are yet to be read, and the Vesuvius Challenge offers further prizes for 2024!