The Vesuvius Challenge prize has been awarded! [N]

https://scrollprize.org/grandprize

It looks like the project was dead in the water, with zero letters read, until a very fortuitous discovery of a "cracked mud" pattern by a person who was staring at the scans using his own visual system for pattern recognition. This led to other people seeing ink in the data, labeling it, training ML models, using them to find more letters and so forth.

data discovery labeling machinelearning ml models pattern recognition people person project recognition scans them training visual water