

Darpa Offers up to $50,000 Prize for Shredder Challenge - jdc
http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2011/10/27.aspx

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mef
Previous posting and discussion <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3164466>

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Udo
Of course it's for US residents only - and needless to say that people who can
solve this problem well stand to make a lot more money than 50k if they found
a startup specializing in this type of data recovery.

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vitrifying
The prize is measly but a fascinating problem, no?

My initial idea is to dump all the material into a large room-sized box. Fans
would then blow the clippings into the air (like lottery balls or something)
and stop to allow it to settle.

Next a high res camera scans the jumbled scene closely from above (using an
X-Y plotter). Upload the images onto a server.

Repeat many times.

Then process the data. First, images of individual clippings are extracted
from the raw images.

Finally, images of the original paper documents are assembled by statistical
algorithms similar to those used by Craig Venter to map and sequence the human
genome.

~~~
maeon3
That sounds like there would be a high probability of one shard obscuring
another shard, or a shard not settling in a diagonal position.

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Herring
This will just encourage people to burn instead of shredding.

~~~
Joakal
You can restore burnt paper. eg:
[http://creativegame.blogspot.com/2008/05/burned-
documents.ht...](http://creativegame.blogspot.com/2008/05/burned-
documents.html)

