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The Newsscientist has a great article about how DARPA, the bankroll behind most of the cooky military R&D in the US, sponsored a contest to reconstruct shredded documents

From the Article,

The race to crack the world’s hardest puzzle has finished – two days earlier than expected. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Shredder Challenge saw nearly 9000 teams competing to reconstruct five shredded documents using a combination of computer science and jigsaw-solving skills, but one team surged ahead of the rest and were proclaimed the winners on Friday night, claiming a $50,000 prize in the process.

The team, known as “All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S.” is made up of three programmers based in San Francisco: Otavio Good, creator of the visual translation tool Word Lens, Luke Alonso, a mobile phone software developer, and Keith Walker, who works on satellite software at Lockheed Martin.

Their winning algorithm automatically suggested matching pieces of the shredded documents based on factors such as the shape of the rip or the marks on the paper. The trio then tasked a group of friends to assemble the suggestions by hand. “Our background writing computer vision, computer graphics, and general simulation software definitely helped us,” explains Good.