The “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S” team figured out the 5 shredded puzzles
The All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S’ team of San Francisco used custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. In total, the winning team spent nearly 600 man-hours developing algorithms and piecing together the five challenge documents that were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.
A copy of the winning team’s submission can be seen here.
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“Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all let alone within the short time frame,” said Dan Kaufman, director, DARPA Information Innovation Office in a statement. “The most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work. We are impressed by the ingenuity this type of competition elicits.”
As a result of the challenge DARPA said it hopes to gain insight into which puzzle solving techniques are quicker and more efficient and whether the wide availability of high resolution photography, communication and crowd-sourcing strategies could be used to quickly obtain valuable information from confiscated, shredded documents.
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