The best reference is from DARPA

Most DARPA Shredder Challenge participants are solving the puzzle by hand, which is intractable for puzzles 3, 4 and 5. We want to use a combination of crowdsourcing and computer vision to solve the puzzles. Using multiple technologies should give our team a great advantage!

• Crowdsourcing: Recruit your friends! The more eyes we have looking on the puzzle the better. Even if you don't have time to solve the puzzle, perhaps your friends will have time - or your friends' friends.
• Computer Vision: Several members of our team are students in computer vision. We will run crowdsourced partial solutions through advanced algorithms for clustering pieces and finding which pieces are likely to go together. This will make subsequent puzzle solving easier for participants.

If UCSD wins, the amount of money an individual will win is based on how many edges they connect in the puzzles and the number of edges resulting from the work done by the people they recruit connect.

• For every edge connected you will receive $1.00.
• For every edge connected by someone you recruited you will receive $0.50.
• For every edge connected by someone recruited by someone you recruited you will receive $0.25.
• And so on...

An example of this is shown in the image below. Alice recruits Bob and Betty. Then Betty recruits Carol.

The rationale behind this payment scheme is that it is hardest to actually fit puzzle pieces together. However, it is unreasonable that one person would complete all the puzzles by themself. Recruiting players is essential to solving all the puzzles. The successful recruiters will be rewarded as well.

Only participants connecting edges for the first time will receive money. So needlessly removing and reconnecting an edge won't result in any payoff.

We won't know if a piece is correctly placed until a significant portion of the puzzle is complete. We will determine the awardees upon completion of each puzzle.

Only one team can win the DARPA Shredder Challenge. If UCSD wins, the $50,000 award will be distributed among the participants. The developers and computer scientists leading the UCSD team are not collecting any money. If there is left over money, the rest will be donated to charity. Unfortunately, in the case that UCSD doesn't win, then no money will be awarded to us or distributed to participants.

Click on a piece to select it. A blue circle around the piece will indicate that you have successfully selected the piece. If a red circle appears, that means someone else is working on that piece. You can try to select another piece or wait for that person to release it.

Once you have selected a piece, click and drag or use WASD to move the piece around. Use Q and E to rotate the piece counter-clockwise and clockwise, respectively. Once you are satisfied with your move, click the piece again or click on the canvas to deselect.

You can use N to zoom out and M to zoom in. Alternatively, you can double click to zoom in; while pressing shift double click to zoom out.

You are able select multiple pieces by holding shift and dragging a box over all the pieces. You can then use WASD to move them pieces to the correct locations. (No rotate yet!)

We aren't sure what causes this. But make sure

• Flash is installed
• The site http://imgur.com/ is not blocked by your firewall

Sometimes, all that is need is a refresh of the page.

If speed is an issue, it seems that Google Chrome loads the images the fastest

For obvious reasons we are unable to show the completed puzzles on the website while the competition is still running. Once the DARPA Shredder Challenge is over (Dec. 4) or we complete all the puzzles we will release screenshots and possibly time-lapsed videos of the puzzles.