Hi folks, I'm the co-creator of the Vesuvius Challenge. We now have nearly $1.5M in prizes, thanks to a lot of amazing sponsors. Happy to answer any questions anyone has.
One of the worries I have is that the grand prize is so top weighted. It feels daunting to want to attempt to work on something like this if there's only one winner. If my team isn't the first to win it, but we contribute an interesting method, the most we can get is a 2000$ open source prize?
We're thinking about this too. The overall prize pool was about 6x smaller a week ago so we are still digesting this rapid influx of sponsorship.
The grand prize goes to the _first_ team to read 4 passages from the scrolls. But we could, for example, award something to the second team to do so. Or, we could award something to the team that reads the _most_ passages by the end of the year.
We deliberately did not allocate all of the recent sponsorships to the grand prize so we can solve for this exact challenge. So, we have about $500k in unallocated prize money, and might use a good chunk of it towards something like this. We're open to ideas, and consulting with experts from Xprize etc.
