The Puzzle

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wanted to know how quickly people could put shredded documents back together again. Turns out the answer is: pretty quickly. In fact, some participants had online puzzles of shredded documents solved within days. DARPA launched the challenge with a $50,000 dollar top prize. They're looking to develop a better technology or technique for putting shredded documents back together. So far, about 8,200 teams have signed up. They can download a number of shredded documents as part of the challenge. DARPA said the teams moving up the leader board have figured out ways to go beyond the traditional, manual jigsaw-puzzle approach. At least two crowdsourced efforts have piqued the interest of DARPA.