DARPA Shredder Challenge 2011 was a prize competition for exploring methods to reconstruct documents shredded by a variety of paper shredding techniques. The aim of the challenge was to "assess potential capabilities that could be used by the U.S. warfighters operating in war zones, but might also identify vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected by shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community". The competition was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a research organization of the United States Department of Defense.[1] Congress authorized DARPA to award cash prizes to further DARPA’s mission to sponsor revolutionary, high-payoff research that bridges the gap between fundamental discoveries and their use for national security.
Under the rules of the competition, the $50,000 challenge award would be granted to the first team to submit the answers to questions relating to a hidden mystery. The mystery verified that the team was able to extract meaningful intelligence from the page that was thought destroyed. The secret answers could be acquired by reconstructing five individual puzzles that were created by shredding one or more single-sided hand-written documents.[1] Nearly 9,000 teams participated in this competition.[2][3][4] The challenge began at 12:00PM EDT on October 27, 2011 and had a deadline 11:59PM EST on December 4, 2011.[1]
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The San Francisco-based team "All Your Shreds are Belong to U.S." won the competition 32 days after the competition went live,[5] or 3 days ahead of schedule.[6][7] The team used a combination of techniques to solve the puzzles: custom-coded computer-vision algorithm were created to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.[4] The 5-person team led by a technology enterprenuer Otavio Good also included Keith Walker, Winnie Tong, Luke Alonso, and Zina Tebaykina, with 3 more persons joining to help in the end.[2] The team's 3 programmers had strong image processing skills that enabled them to win this challenge: Otavio Good is the creator of the visual translation tool Word Lens, Luke Alonso is a developer of the mobile phone application "Cabana", and Keith Walker is a programmer working on a satellite software at Lockheed Martin.[3] Approximately 600 man-hours were dedicated by the team to reconstruct 5 documents shredded into more than 10,000 pieces.[4][6][8] According to Good, the team's name was based on an Internet meme "All your base are belong to us".[2]
In the final standings,[9] the top ten teams reported are:
Place | Name | Hometown | Points |
---|---|---|---|
1 | All Your Shreds are Belong to U.S. | San Francisco, CA | 50 |
2 | Shroddon | Maryland | 30 |
3 | wasabi | Kenmore, WA | 26 |
4 | mki | unknown | 22 |
5 | mmbd | unknown | 22 |
6 | UCSD | San Diego, CA | 22 |
7 | Craig Landrum | unknown | 19 |
8 | mkelly | unknown | 19 |
9 | Icandoit | unknown | 19 |
10 | Goldsong | unknown | 17 |