I’ve always wondered how secure it was to shred documents, and if there was a feasible way for someone motivated enough to reassemble the pieces. Well, it turns out that there is a way.

According to BBC, a team of computer programmers from California have developed software they say shows that computers can, in theory, do most of the hard work in re-assembling shredded documents:

It works by matching up individual shreds based on minuscule clues in each shred – the contour of the tears, a barely-visible watermark, and traces of writing, for instance – and can work incalculably faster than a human undertaking the same task.

It was the successful entry in a document shredder competition launched this autumn by the US military, in an attempt to encourage research on what is essentially a maths problem – how to assemble a puzzle efficiently.

In October, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s research arm, offered $50,000 (£31,961) to the first team to reassemble five shredded hand-written documents and answer the puzzles contained in each of them.

There were more than 9,000 (!) entries to the DARPA competition. The winning team name? All Your Shreds Are Belong to US, an obvious riff on All Your Base Are Belong to Us. If you’re interested in finding out more, NPR has a soundbite with Octavio Good, the software developer of the team that won the DARPA challenge.