DARPA...Holds Contest to Solve World's 5 Hardest Puzzles

This is what they have come up with so far.

If you love jigsaw puzzles and a tough challenge, you might want to help UC San Diego try to win a global competition in which players are using their computers to reassemble shredded documents and figure out a question about the information that emerges. The contest, known as the Shredder Challenge, is an effort by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to find new ways for warfighters to electronically restore documents recovered in war zones.

This seems kind of strange for DARPA to be involved with a contest.

There are five puzzles in the contest, each exponentially harder than the previous one. A team from UCSD composed of researcher Manuel Cebrian and six graduate students is currently working on puzzle No. 3, aided by more than 2,700 people from 30 countries who've been assigned to piece together specific scraps.

People and University's all over the world are playing.

DARPA has provided an incentive; it will give out up to $50,000 to the first people who successfully crack the puzzles. Using Cerbian's approach, each person will win money proportionate to the number of pieces they correctly put together, or the number of people they recruit to participate in the contest. Players will win only a small amount of money because they're working on small sections of the puzzles.

I guess they are looking for new document reconstruction experts.

Getting people to go online to work on a common goal -- such as solving a problem -- is known as crowdsourcing. That's exactly what members of the UCSD team are now doing.

"Crowdsourcing" C'mon man....You just made that word up...

Link to Story and Contest

I like these sorts of things, it pushes people to take part in something they dont fully know about, and yet be a real help to its sucess at the same time.

Hopefully we will see more and more of these types of challenges and actually create a community good at solving them, then set them all on somthing we dont know the solution to yet

reply to post by whyamIhere
Neat stuff. DARPA tends to scare me sometimes, but this isn't a bad idea at all. Never underestimate what the hive mind can accomplish.

Good article here at Cracked: 5 Mind Blowing Things Crowds Do Better Than Experts.

Take care.

The problem is that the reward is crap (at least it seems like it to me). I wonder how many man hours and resources it will take to complete all of those puzzles?? $50k is not a lot of prize money for something that could be so beneficial to the government.

Originally posted by jburg6
The problem is that the reward is crap (at least it seems like it to me). I wonder how many man hours and resources it will take to complete all of those puzzles?? $50k is not a lot of prize money for something that could be so beneficial to the government.

They must have a motive...

You are right...$50,000 does not seem like a lot of money to a University.

I wonder what document they have...

That they needs put back together.

Originally posted by Praetorius
reply to post by whyamIhere

 

Neat stuff. DARPA tends to scare me sometimes, but this isn't a bad idea at all. Never underestimate what the hive mind can accomplish.

Good article here at Cracked: 5 Mind Blowing Things Crowds Do Better Than Experts.

Take care.

That was quite a link you gave.

Anyone ever read the book "Enders Game"? This was required reading in the Marines....

Maybe they are looking for new employees, and this is a way to find people who can solve puzzles. Sort of like free recruitment, and they can sort out who they do not want without all the hassle of interviews and other procedures. Of course, it could be something else, but it does sound like some sort of social experiment, and I am sure that people will have fun participating.

You should read the article before commenting on it, don't you think?

This is actually kind of scary. Basically, there are millions of people out there that you can get to spend billions of hours of time doing whatever you want them to, if you just MAKE A GAME OUT OF IT.

Think about that for a minute.

reply to post by CaptChaos


How is this any different than playing Farmville on Facebook, or Second Life or any of those other type of social networks? In fact, one might be able to say the same thing about ATS, as there are people here who spend hours trying to figure things out, which is the same as solving puzzles.

This does not mean I think it is a good idea or a bad idea, as I am really not sure. Maybe the government is just doing what everyone else is already doing, and people can choose not to participate, if they do not like the idea.

Reminds me of the news story I heard the other day.

Get this, NASA is looking for astronauts and is urging people to apply for the position.

They have a recruitment video and a job description. I heard this on CNN so do a google search if interested.

Maybe they are looking for bunker buddys???

work for nasa

Neat sound like a dard side of a SETI project I'm in
Ok what that link again at work can't see it block
have to wait till i get home tomorrow
2in 2 out