Black and white: You shred an important document, it stays deleted forever. There's no way that your average ruffian is going to sift through your trash bag in the dumpster, organize together all the bits and pieces of paper you've created for yourself, and then (painfully) reconstruct whatever secret message it is that you've opted to chop into tiny bits.

Right?

As it turns it, it took the eight members of team "All Your Shreds Belong to U.S." only 33 days to piece together more than 10,000 shredded pieces of paper, split across five puzzles, as part of the U.S. Defense Department's "Shredder Challenge." The team will now face an even greater challenge: Splitting a $50,000 prize as a reward for the roughly 600 man-hours they spent solving the puzzles (that's $83.33 an hour, we note), which were made up of normal plaintext messages, encoded messages, and one picture puzzle.

Of course, there's also the notoriety.

"Lots of experts were skeptical that a solution could be produced at all let alone within the short time frame," said Dan Kaufman, director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office, in a statement. "The most effective approaches were not purely computational or crowd-sourced, but used a combination blended with some clever detective work. We are impressed by the ingenuity this type of competition elicits."

Almost 9,000 teams participated in DARPA's challenge. And as ABC News notes, the teams' strategies for solving the shredded messages  still downloadable from DARPA's site, if you'd like to take a crack at them yourselves  varied almost as much as the puzzles themselves.

Some teams opted for a crowdsourced-style method, creating programs that could open up their efforts to contributions from users worldwide, in the hopes that more rods in the fire would lead to faster results. And on the other side of the spectrum sat Craig Landrum, a team of one, whose single strategy was to take the shredded bits and piece them together by hand.

According to ABC, "All Your Shreds" found success by developing a visual identification program that could analyze the context of an individual fragment and offer matching recommendations based on its knowledge of every other piece.

"Imagine if you're playing a regular puzzle," said lead "Shreds" programmer Otavio Good, in an interview with ABC. "Pieces are scattered around. You click the place that you want to match a piece to and the computer recommends a number of pieces ordered by score and you chose which one you like the best."

Good goes on to note that preforming this process on an actual shredded document in a real-world situation would be far harder to accomplish. That said, maybe it's time to start splitting critical trash between the home and the ol' workplace