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DARPA: Reconstruct Shredded Docs, Win $50K USD

Posted by timothy on from the perfect-for-our-recycled-checkbooks dept.

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."

2 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I think they know how to do this very well alre by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. Cheapasses by RobinEggs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.