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$50,000 To Solve the Most Complicated Puzzle Ever
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 $50,000, which the UCSD team has decided to share among the people who participate. If they win, you would also receive cash for every person you recruit to the effort! The professor leading the team, Manuel Cebrian, won the challenge two years ago, so his odds of winning again are great"
only 50k for a problem that complex? If you could solve this problem, I say copyright and make millions off of the algorithm.
The rules should require that the same method that solved the initial puzzle be successfully applied to 10 more shredded documents, to weed out methods that don't scale.
If there is an offline version of this, it involves a garbage bag full of shredded 5$ bills and some scotch tape.
God spoke to me
I never really understood the purpose of shredding documents. If your documents are that sensitive, why not just burn them, leaving no trace of legible text? It seems like it would be cheaper, easier and faster too. Just throw them in a barrel outside, put a little lighter fluid in, and drop a match. Why is this not common?
Don't the warlords have access to fire? I'm pretty sure that brings about a thoroughly unrecoverable destruction of the documents...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
$5 million is closer to the actual effort required to solve the problem, at least for the software, and personally, as a software engineer, I believe the problem to be solvable. Maybe tack on a few more million(s) if you want reliable hardware to scan in the shreds with minimal human effort.
That said, the whole "Hey guys, we're having a contest!" strategy has paid off in the past, the X-prize and Lindburgs flight being prime examples. Hell, Googles "Summer of Code" seems to work out for them nicely. They get a cheap, motivated, enthusiastic labor force.
Being older, wiser, and less motivated, when I hear "contest" I immediately think "I'm busy already, do it yourself."
So, it's essentially worth less than a pack of gum.
Everyone in the civilized world is worried about what will happen if terrorists gain access to this technology. That's why most nations have signed the Fire Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it's why the International Combustive Energy Agency is working round-the-clock to keep this technology from falling into the wrong hands (while somehow also promoting civilian use of combustive energy).
You've got to be a lot more careful about talking about such restricted technology and its possible uses.
How dare you question the wisdom of the Homeland Security Act.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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.
...remember the days when /. had actual editors that could catch related or duplicate summaries and either tie them together or throw them out? No? Me either.
Just another example of college kids not getting paid enough for their skills. A puzzle solver fresh out of college should be making three times that at least.
Hardly of any concern for a citizenry that post everything about themselves on facebook.
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
What about 600 million shreds from 45 million documents?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
"The professor leading the team, Manuel Cebrian, won the challenge two years ago, so his odds of winning again are great[.]"
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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).
As far as I know, German Fraunhofer Institute has a solution for this kind of problem: http://www.ipk.fraunhofer.de/component/content/category/167-autsicherheitstechnikstasischnipsel (p.8ff, German language).
Looks like they have few problems assembling torn pages, and geometrically correct results for shredded paper (yet not necessarily correct content).