San Francisco Team Solves DARPA Shredder Challenge

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/security/232200745

By Elizabeth Montalbano
InformationWeek
December 05, 2011

Custom-code computer-vision algorithms helped a San Francisco-based team 
solve a challenge by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 
(DARPA) to solve complex puzzles comprised of shredded documents.

Thirty-three days after DARPA unveiled the so-called Shredder Challenge, 
a team of three programmers called "All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S." 
pieced together the five documents in the challenge, beating out nearly 
9,000 other teams to claim the $50,000 prize.

The team spent nearly 600 hours creating algorithms to assemble the 
documents, which were shredded into more than 10,000 pieces. The team 
developed algorithms to suggest fragment pairings and then manually 
verified the pairings to piece together the documents--which in the end 
turned out to have a common theme (PDF).

The theme running throughout the puzzles was Antonio Prohias, creator of 
a comic strip that debuted in Mad Magazine in 1961 called "Spy vs. Spy." 
The strip spawned a television show and other commercial paraphernalia.

[...]


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