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$50,000 To Solve the Most Complicated Puzzle Ever

Posted by samzenpus on from the gather-the-edge-pieces dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A team from UC San Diego is using crowd-sourcing as a tool to solve the most complicated puzzle ever attempted, which involves piecing together roughly 10,000 pieces of different documents that have been shredded. (The challenge is designed to reveal new techniques for reconstructing destroyed documents, which are often confiscated by troops in war zones). The prize for solving this jigsaw puzzle is $50,000, which the UCSD team has decided to share among the people who participate. If they win, you would also receive cash for every person you recruit to the effort! The professor leading the team, Manuel Cebrian, won the challenge two years ago, so his odds of winning again are great"

8 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. only 50k for a problem that complex? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    only 50k for a problem that complex? If you could solve this problem, I say copyright and make millions off of the algorithm.

  2. Doesn't scale by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The rules should require that the same method that solved the initial puzzle be successfully applied to 10 more shredded documents, to weed out methods that don't scale.

  3. Why are the documents shredded to begin with? by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Don't the warlords have access to fire? I'm pretty sure that brings about a thoroughly unrecoverable destruction of the documents...

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    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  4. Fifty cents a person by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    To complete this new challenge, it could take as many as 100,000 people

    So, it's essentially worth less than a pack of gum.

    1. Re:Fifty cents a person by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hey, it's a month's wage in some poor countries, start building a document rebuilding plant somewhere in backwater Africa.

      Sorry to mix actual data in your First World prejudices, but the GDP per capita of the poorest country is over $300, so monthly it would be around US 18$.

      There are only 15 countries with a GDP per capita inferior to 100$ month

      Right, because income is evenly distributed there, and there aren't dirt poor people living off almost nothing. Plus, you're using PPP GDP per capita, rather than GDP per capita at nominal exchange rates. If I pay someone in another country $1, they get to buy what $1 buys in their country, not what $1 buys in the USA.

      Sorry to mix actual facts into your misrepresented data.

  5. Confused? by wisnoskij · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is it just me or does this make little to no sense.
    You cannot scale putting together puzzle pieces because the same person needs to both see two pieces that go together and recognize that they match.
    So yes more people help, but if there are 10 million pieces then the average person would have to look at over 1 million pieces before they have even seen two that go together.

    And this seems like a very easy thing to computise.
    You digitize the shredded documents.
    You run a program that looks for similarities around the edges.
    You stick likely candidates together and either ask for human confirmation or run a text recognition algorithm to see if the result makes sense.

    Now this becomes harder if the direct edge of many of the shredded parts are blank, but still more then doable if you use spacing recognition(calc how big a space is in this document and look for the correspond amount of missing space on the other side), line up the text rows, and some basic word statistic (if you see "he ...", for example you are likely looking for a "T" on the right side of another strip).

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
    1. Re:Confused? by Intropy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      For N items, there are N! ways to arrange them. That doesn't make sorting an N! problem.

  6. Re:Call me paranoid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Because spying on *US citizens* is the worst thing they could ever do.

    First, obviously we non-US citizens just deserve to spied on. But that is not the purpose of the $50k challenge.

    This is for captured documents after *invading* nations (namely, after killing the goverment workers and entering their buildings). This is not *defending* the Fath^H^H^H^HHomeland. It is for offensive warfare on foreign soil.

    And "saving lives" in the article means obviously saving *US lives* (the lives of us proto-humans dwelling on the rest of the planet never counts anyway).