DARPA: Reconstruct Shredded Docs, Win $50K USD

ematic writes with a link to an interesting competition from DARPA: "The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information that may save lives or offer critical information about an adversary's plans. Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are handwritten. We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area. The Shredder Challenge is composed of five separate problems. The overall prize awarded depends on the number and difficulty of problems solved."

Comments

Re:I think they know how to do this very well alre

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I've been hitting the shredded documents with a wrench for the last 10 minutes, it doesn't seem to be working.

Shred?

[MarkGriz]

Any adversary that shreds rather than incinerates critical information they don't want recovered isn't much of an adversary.

Re:Shred?

[halivar]

Bundle the documents up in a hardcover, put a picture of Snooki on the front and give her writing credit. Distribute to any bookstore in the country that will take it. The secret will be safe forever.

Cheapasses

[RobinEggs]

You gotta love when someone offers a $50,000 prize for an improvement that would save them millions of dollars in labor, not to mention the value of files reconstructed that might have been ignored before it became so much easier to do.

A million dollars for improving the movie recommendations on Netflix, and $50,000 for a massive intelligence breakthrough?

Way to go, Pentagon. Way to prove that even with a defense budget of $649 billion dollars you can still be a total cheapass.

Re:I think they know how to do this very well alre

[Verdatum]

I get this all the time. You're probably using imperial; try switching to metric.

Re:Puny prize

[lgw]

Well, the normal approach is to scan all the remains, calculate a checksum for the pattern along each edge, then match the checksums to reconstruct the docuement. Without crosscut shredding this is very fast and effective.

As I understand it, the government now shreds anything important (paper, hard drive, etc) down to less than 1mm on a side, so it's not such an easy problem these days - veyr many disctint pieces, and not much distinctness along the edges.