DARPA has announced the winner of their shredding challenge. The contest was set up to see in teams could put shredded paper back together. It was to simulate a situation where shredded paper was recovered by US troops. There were 5 tests with varying sizes of cross-cut shredders.

The winning team was All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S. The are a team from San Francisco who used software and human assembly. The team now has an extra $50,000 for some holiday shopping. The estimate it took around 600 hours to code the application that solved the problem.

The fundamental problem with cross-cut shredders is that they cut the information but don’t destroy it. A better solution is to tear the paper. This destroys all the information on the edge and would require a great deal more work to reassemble. The good news is that every document shredding service uses this type of machinery.