The end result is a series of jigsaw pieces: By themselves, the jigsaw pieces aren’t tremendously useful.
But the software can chunk them together in various ways to make possible letters.
The students didn’t even need to be able to read Latin. At first, “the idea of involving high-school students was considered foolish,” says Merialdo, who dreamed up In Codice Ratio.
“But now the machine is learning thanks to their efforts.
If you want to peruse anything else, you have to apply for special access, schlep all the way to Rome, and go through every page by hand. Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time.