Comment Re:Did it really need AI? (Score 5, Informative) 47
First: you are erroneously hallucinating that there is a difference between "ML" and "a boatload of maths." Machine learning is a branch of statistics. It is the biggest boatload of maths.
Second: the raw data looks like this: researchers are looking for a "crackle" pattern indicative of where ink should be. Nothing is visible to the naked eye because the black carbon ink is chemically indistinguishable from the carbonized papyrus beneath.
The picture in the article is misleadingly taken out of context: it shows the output of Farritor's model with coloured annotations manually added by linguists. No machines were involved in assigning identities to the letters, since there was so little information that needed parsing. Maybe someday an OCR algorithm will be developed for preprocessed Herculaneum scrolls, but there's no shortage of expert human labour, as most Classics departments haven't had a new manuscript to edit in a very long time.
Farritor's model was trained on manually-labelled data; he identified the "crackle" patterns in smaller sections of the available images, as Casey had before him, and enlarged the training set until it was adequate to start finding new signals on its own. This is by far the least human-effort-intensive approach to the problem, and it still took many months to surface because of the extreme barrier to entry in terms of expertise.
If there were another way, it would have been done by now.