The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79 laid waste to Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum where the intense blast of hot gas carbonised hundreds of ancient scrolls in the library of an enormous luxury villa.

Now, researchers are launching a global contest to read the charred papyri after demonstrating that an artificial intelligence programme can extract letters and symbols from high-resolution X-ray images of the fragile, unrolled documents.

Scientists led by Prof Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, were able to read the ink on surface and hidden layers of scrolls by training a machine-learning algorithm to spot subtle differences in the papyrus structure captured by the X-ray images.

“We’ve shown how to read the ink of Herculaneum. That gives us the opportunity to reveal 50, 70, maybe 80% of the entire collection,” said Seales. “We’ve built the boat. Now we want everybody to get on and sail it with us.”

For the Vesuvius challenge, Seales’s team is releasing its software and thousands of 3D X-ray images of two rolled-up scrolls and three papyrus fragments. The hope is that $250,000 (£207,800) in prizes attracts global research groups who can improve the artificial intelligence and accelerate the decoding of the only intact library to survive from antiquity.

“We’re having a competition so we can scale up our ability to extract more and more of the text,” Seales said. “The competitors will be standing on our shoulders with all of our work in hand.”

Teams that enter will compete for a grand prize of $150,000, awarded to the first to read four passages of text from the inner layers of the scrolls before the end of 2023. Progress prizes include $50,000 for accurately detecting ink on the papyri from the 3D X-ray scans.

The two unopened scrolls belong to the Institut de France in Paris and are among hundreds discovered in the 1750s when excavations at the buried villa revealed a lavish library of Epicurean philosophical texts. The enormous building is thought to have once belonged to a wealthy Roman statesman, possibly Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

While the black ink used to write the scrolls cannot be seen on the charred papyri, infrared images of surface fragments have revealed Greek letters and symbols. Armed with these and X-ray images of the same fragments, Seales’s team trained their algorithm to read the lettering from X-ray images alone. Once trained, the algorithm could then spot new text in hidden layers of the tightly wrapped scrolls.

“A human cannot pick this out with their eye,” Seales said. “The ink fills in the gaps that otherwise create a waffle-like pattern of the papyrus fibres. That pattern gets coated and filled in and I think that subtle change is what’s being learned.”

The majority of Herculaneum scrolls analysed so far are written in ancient Greek, but some might contain Latin texts. There could also be poems by Sappho or the treatise Mark Anthony wrote on his drunkenness. Seales hopes to find evidence of early Christian philosophy. “While others would love to see some of the lost work of the ancients, what I’d like to see is evidence of the turmoil that was happening in the first century around the development of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian tradition as it was evolving.”

Stephen Parsons, a PhD candidate on the team, said the technology was at the very limit of being able to read the ink and that improvements from competitors could lead to dramatic gains in understanding the scrolls. Fragments analysed so far have revealed letters from Philodemus’s work, On Vices and the Opposite Virtues, and others from a scroll about Hellenistic dynastic history.

“I love to wonder what’s in there and I love to imagine the human beings who made these things,” Parsons said. “It’s an incredible moment to have been the person to unveil some of this text. Even if it’s only one or two characters, that’s something a human hand wrote nearly 2,000 years ago and went unseen until I saw it on my computer screen, sitting at my desk or on my couch. For me, that’s an unforgettable moment of connection across time.”

Tobias Reinhardt, professor of the Latin language and literature at the university of Oxford, said: “To me the idea that getting more people with the right expertise to think about these problems is compelling. The competition promises to be a more effective tool for attracting attention from what is a vast and fast-evolving field than approaches to individual researchers and companies.”