The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s “Shredder Challenge” could be called the world’s ultimate jigsaw puzzle contest. But it was serious business for the nearly 9,000 teams of problem solvers from all over the world who entered the competition after DARPA officials launched it in late October.

In the Shredder Challenge competitors attempted to reconstruct machine-shredded documents in increasingly difficult stages to claim DARPA’s $50,000 prize. The challenge comprised five separate puzzles in which the number of documents, the content of the documents and the technique employed to shred the documents varied to make the challenge progressively more difficult. Keep reading →