A 600 million-piece communist jigsaw puzzle
A German research team has created software to reassemble 45 million pages of shredded documents from East Germany’s communist State Security Service, the Stasi. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Stasi agents began destroying the documents into 600 million pieces. The shredding machines got overloaded, so they resorted to tearing them by hand. (Just think of all the paper cuts.) ...
A German research team has created software to reassemble 45 million pages of shredded documents from East Germany's communist State Security Service, the Stasi. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Stasi agents began destroying the documents into 600 million pieces. The shredding machines got overloaded, so they resorted to tearing them by hand. (Just think of all the paper cuts.)
A German research team has created software to reassemble 45 million pages of shredded documents from East Germany’s communist State Security Service, the Stasi. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Stasi agents began destroying the documents into 600 million pieces. The shredding machines got overloaded, so they resorted to tearing them by hand. (Just think of all the paper cuts.)
The software works like a human putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are scanned. Next, the digital images are analyzed and grouped by color, shape, handwriting, typeface, and other characteristics. Then similar pieces are put together. The main difference? Speed. It took 24 people 12 years to reassemble 323 sacks of paper. The software is expected to finish the remaining 16,000 sacks in about five years.
If the software fails, here’s a backup: Iranian carpet weavers. During the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, they reconstructed shredded documents by hand—it wasn’t much of a challenge for people who could tie 400 knots per square inch.
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