At the end of October, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched its Shredder Challenge contest. The objective: create a system for reconstructing shredded papers, then demonstrate it by piecing together five documents, the shredded remains of which were posted on the contest's website. Although the contest had a December 4th deadline, the "All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S." team correctly reassembled all five documents with two days to spare.
The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used "custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification." Members of the team spent approximately 600 man-hours developing algorithms and otherwise working on the challenge, completing everything within 33 days. Because it was able to reconstruct all five documents posted in the contest, the team was able to claim the complete prize of US$50,000.
DARPA hosted the contest both to develop methods of reading shredded documents left behind by enemies in war zones, and to identify ways in which U.S. shredded documents could be read by other parties, so that countermeasures could be developed.
They spend upwards of $100 billion a year, and employ more than 100,000 thousand of \"the worlds brightest\" to solve on this stuff, then discover that a bunch of kids calling themselves \"All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.\" answered their hardest myserty in just a month, for free :-)
LOL.
(hey, what\'s that craclking sound on my internet line?)
Guess the only alternative would be to confetti the shredding to smaller sizes then either chemically dissolve, flash flame, or blow the confetti into the wind.
What will DARPA think of next ?!?
There is no \"American Iranian embassy\" and has never been nor will there ever be an \"American Iranian embassy\"! Many of the alleged document were incorrectly formatted and obviously faked. DTGs and Julian dates did not match.
I have a nice bridge to sell you in Death Valley...