A university student was at a party in August when he received a text that would help him decipher a nearly 2000-year-old message.
In the previous few months, Luke Farritor had joined a worldwide competition to translate ancient Roman scrolls that were damaged by a volcanic eruption in AD 79. The 21-year-old computer science major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln had developed an artificial intelligence program to detect the charred Greek letters written on papyrus.
