Recovery of documents after shredder (prize $ 50,000)

The US military agency DARPA has announced a competition to restore images of crushed residues from an office shredder. The task should interest all fans to put puzzles. Passion also adds a cash prize for first place (50 thousand US dollars).

So, all you need is to register in the contest and download five official tasks. Each of the five archives contains a TIF image (scans of paper after the shredder), as well as a TXT file with questions. Depending on the difficulty of the tasks, you can earn 2, 4, 8, 12 and 24 points.

In the assignments - one or several documents with handwritten text, which are crushed on a new commercial shredder and scanned with a resolution of 400 DPI. In the set of pictures there may be superfluous or missing some fragments.
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In principle, the participants of the competition can add puzzles manually, but this is for real fanatics. The bidder must provide an image of the collected document and briefly explain how he was able to answer the question. It is desirable (but not necessary) to tell about the document recovery method, what algorithms were used, how long the work took.

The contest will run until December 4, 2011, the results will be announced on December 5. Foreigners can participate, but, according to the conditions, only a citizen or a US resident (for example, a runner-up) will receive a cash prize. He, in turn, has the right to fairly share the money with the real winner, if that is a foreigner, then how to agree.