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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
What happens is that the top and botom pages and edges get scorched, but the middle part with the print remains largely intact.
Just throw them in a barrel outside, put a little lighter fluid in, and drop a match. Why is this not common?
Thus speaks someone who hasn't tried to burn more than a couple of sheets of paper.
It takes time to burn more than a few pages at a time. Or an extremely hot fire. Sorry, Mr Bradbury, 451 F won't do it, unless you can wait for weeks.
1. Burning is inconvenient for small volumes of paper.
2. Burning is essentially illegal for large volumes of paper (business scale; Clean Air Act permits).
3. Fireplaces are not as common as they used to be; outdoor burning is illegal in most cities.
4. People can be idiots when using fire outside of a fireplace or permanent fire pit.
5. DIOXIN!
Shredding is like a residential door lock -- good enough to discourage a casual person who is too curious for their own good. Secure commercial shredders rely upon sheer volume and decent mixing (300 "particles" per page x 3 tons of paper dumped at a recycler is a decent level of obscurity) or "hydro-pulping" for the demanding (shred then pulp at paper mill -- good luck reassembling the fibers even if you get to them before bleaching).
What about 600 million shreds from 45 million documents?
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