For those who are unfamiliar with DARPA, it is a US government-funded defence organisation which specialises in exploring the ways in which technological advances can impact upon defence issues and strategies. Or at least that's the boring way to look at it.
The fun way is that DARPA sets interesting little challenges every now and again, usually with $40k-$50k prize pools for successful solutions, which researchers - mostly from universities - tend to solve quicker than even DARPA expected. The last one which springs to mind was a challenge in which researchers had to locate 10 red weather balloons that had been released into the lower atmosphere across the US (in the end a team from MIT solved the challenge pretty easily).
The most recent DARPA challenge is the Shredder challenge - which has now also been solved. The task is simple: to reconstruct shredded documents so that the information on them can be accessed. The result: it can be done - shredders are not 100% safe! (They are now only 99% safe, since the level of expertise required to do this and the lab conditions used for the challenge mean that, in the real world, you needn't worry too much about your shredded material). Still, a double shred couldn't hurt...
Anyway, it's not exactly a mystery why the US government would be interested in this challenge - nor why they set the previously mentioned balloon challenge. Keeping secrets secret and tracking lost objects in the lower atmosphere are pretty obvious aspects of defence, and DARPA's challenge system represents a cost-effective way for the US government to get this research done as quickly and easily as possible.
However, for me every DARPA challenge I read about gives me both a bit of fun - and sends a shiver down my spine. There's the sheer delight at the novelty of the solutions that researchers come up with as well as genuine awe at how easy it seems (sometimes the challenges are solved very quickly) - which all makes the US defence department look a bit daft compared with the geniuses over in the university labs (Yay for brains! Boo for guns! etc).
But also there's always that niggling fear of using scientific minds to assist defence departments and the military in their innocent-looking little games - which we know will have application probably in much less fun situations and environments. On the website for the challenge for example there's talk of documents seized in war zones and the need to decipher them - meaning that developing techniques for this might very directly affect what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran (coming to a screen near you very soon by the looks of things). And when I say 'affect', what I mean is literally life and death (and maybe some torture in between) since this is what tends to happen in such situations of conflict.
Thus there's always echoes of science's unfortunate contribution to human suffering and misery in these aspects of DARPA challenges (though, just to be clear, I'm not saying reconstructing shredded documents is akin to developing nuclear weapons), even if only at the symbolic level, and I can never really fully shake the unease at this slightly sinister dynamic whenever news of another fun DARPA challenge comes along...
