DARPA: Reconstruct Shredded Docs, Win $50K USD

ematic writes with a link to an interesting competition from DARPA: "The ability to reconstruct shredded documents will potentially yield information that may save lives or offer critical information about an adversary's plans. Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are handwritten. We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area. The Shredder Challenge is composed of five separate problems. The overall prize awarded depends on the number and difficulty of problems solved."

I think they know how to do this very well already

[mbkennel]

http://xkcd.com/538/ [xkcd.com]

Puny prize

[afidel]

Someone with a unique way of reconstructing shredded documents can probably earn more than that in one afternoon of dumpster diving.

Shred?

[MarkGriz]

Any adversary that shreds rather than incinerates critical information they don't want recovered isn't much of an adversary.

Cheapasses

[RobinEggs]

You gotta love when someone offers a $50,000 prize for an improvement that would save them millions of dollars in labor, not to mention the value of files reconstructed that might have been ignored before it became so much easier to do.

A million dollars for improving the movie recommendations on Netflix, and $50,000 for a massive intelligence breakthrough?

Way to go, Pentagon. Way to prove that even with a defense budget of $649 billion dollars you can still be a total cheapass.

That's a little... cheap

[Leebert]

I think you'd be better off, if you were successful, to simply commercialize it. $50,000? That's like the first year's support contract on the software you'll sell them for $300,000 per seat. And since it's "enterprise" software, it doesn't even have to actually work particularly well. That's why you sell the support contracts.

Dumbasses

[malakai]

I know you are a 7 digit, so I shouldn't expect much, but read the fucking article. You have to submit a solution to the 'fake' challenge. This nets them no value. You don't turn in your code, or handover the process you used to solve it. At most you specify "I did this manually, automatically, or a mix". So you can win $50k for solving something, and then walk away. You can tell them to fuck off, you won't sell them your super-secret procedure no matter how much they offer you. But thanks for the 50k, kk, byebye.