SOLVING jigsaw puzzles might seem worlds away from ensuring national security, but $50,000 says otherwise. That is the prize on offer in the Shredder Challenge, which tasks computer scientists and puzzle-solvers with reconstructing shredded documents to reveal the information they contain.
Set up by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the challenge consists of five increasingly difficult puzzles, ramping up from 224 pieces to over 6000. There is more than just money at stake. Methods used to solve the challenge could one day help read a despot's destroyed documents or tackle biological puzzles.
The pieces to the puzzle are all on DARPA's website as scanned images. "The DARPA puzzles are somewhat like jigsaw puzzles, but there are major and important differences," says Craig Landrum, a former codebreaker for the US National Security Agency who is ...
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