Monday, November 21, 2011

DARPA Shredder Challenge - you could win $50,000


On October 27th, DARPA announced their Shredder Challenge. Try to unshred 5 documents for $50,000. There has been a few notable efforts such as UCSD's web based approach. But, that page has recently been compromised due to malicious users.

With the help of a few colleagues, we had also created a web-based version very early on. But, it was missing some of the login engineering and UI of the UCSD effort. So, we never made it public. But rather than attempt to build a full on competitor, we've decided to open up the tool we built for anyone to try to win the contest themselves!

http://www.unshred.me/1

You can create a private branch of each puzzle if you want to try to give it a go alone, or you can contribute to the main public copy of the puzzle. If our image analysis tinkering goes well, we may add some tools to help make finding matches easier.

NOTE: The deadline for submitting answers to DARPA is December 4, 2011 (11:59PM EST)! Only 13 days left.

GO!

5 comments:

Raf said...

Got Puzzle 1! Any place for us to collaborate (with words) or at least, mark the answer?

A useful addition would be arbitrary text label creation (for incomplete word suggestions)

Daniel Smith said...

Awesome and fun, but your interface needs to allow grouping of objects. But maybe it should require they be grouped *only* after zooming in to make more certain of the fit. Moving each strip individually is tedious at best.

Daniel Smith said...

And something like a recycling bin for blank pieces. The interface takes too long to load for me and part of that is having to manage all those individual pieces.

An "align all" and a "spread out - no overlaps" feature would also be incredibly useful.

Joseph said...

Puzzle 2 done. I agree that it would be helpful to be able to point out things to each other: the patterns that the shredding creates, the word that you're trying to make, your logic for a certain placement, etc.

Per said...

Puzzle 2 was indeed fun to solve but I would have loved som tagging or chat function.