Increasing Kaggle ink detection prizes to $100k, and announcing open source prizes
The best 3 open source contributions by April 11th 11:59pm PT will win $2k (plus a fun surprise!)
Ink Detection Progress Prize
More incredibly generous people have stepped forward to make sure this ancient puzzle gets solved! We now have over 1 million dollars in prizes.
With this huge surge in the prize pool, we are excited to announce an increase the number and size of the prizes for the Ink Detection Progress Prize, since this is one of the most important milestones toward the grand prize. We now have $100,000 in prizes for Ink Detection, broken down like this:
1st place: $25,000
2nd place: $20,000
3rd place: $15,000
4th place: $10,000
5th–10th: $5,000
Having 10 prizes means that at the end of the competition, we’ll have 10 open source solutions to the ink detection problem, which means a higher probability that one of the solutions can scale to a full scroll.
Note that at the same time we are also updating our metric for evaluation to be more in line with what good solutions will look like; more details here.
Open source prizes
All of us organizing the Vesuvius Challenge are big believers in open source and incremental progress. We want to encourage building in the open and benefiting the whole community — something that is typically disincentivized in a competition format.
That’s why we are introducing “open source prizes”. These are small prizes that may be awarded for any open source or publicly available contributions: software, documentation, research notes, Kaggle notebooks, anything goes.
Anything that you release in public can qualify for an open source prize. You need to publicly release your work before you can win an open source prize.
It has to be accessible and usable by other contestants (e.g. licensed under MIT, Apache, GPL, Creative Commons, etc).
You may make multiple submissions. Please edit the form when doing so. We may award a single prize to a set of multiple submissions by one person or team.
Your submission will be judged subjectively: the Technical Team (Dr. Brent Seales, Nat Friedman, Stephen Parsons, Seth Parker, JP Posma, and Daniel Havíř) will decide what they think are the best open source contributions.
The first batch of prizes will be 3 prizes of $2,000 each (plus a fun surprise!), which you must submit for by April 11th 11:59pm PT.
If you are submitting as a team, the team leader should make the submission, and is responsible for distributing the prize money (and fun surprise) among the team.
Make your submissions here.
We’re planning to do more of these. Let’s see what y’all can come up with! :-) Good luck!!
Livestream Q&A
In case you missed it, we recorded the livestream Q&A. You had excellent questions for us, and hopefully we were able to give some insights into the finer details of the competition.