While driving to his SpaceX internship in Texas in March 2023, 22-year-old Luke Farritor was listening to a podcast about a niche use of artificial intelligence: deciphering ancient scrolls. Then, he heard about a new competition—called the Vesuvius Challenge—being offered to the first person who could use AI to decode an ancient scroll from the ruins near Pompeii. The prize? One million dollars. And anyone with a laptop could compete. Farritor, then enrolled as a computer science major at the U...