Comment Made for Crowdsourcing (Score 2) 94
I heard about this on RadioLab awhile ago - a trash dump full of fragments of old scrolls. I believe it was the "Detective Stories" episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2007/sep/10/
They were saying it would take centuries to match up all of the pieces, because they only had a few people working on it, and so many scraps to go through. My immediate thought was that they should scan them all and put them on the Internet, and some bored 17 year old would write a program in Scala that would run in the cloud and match everything up in a weekend. Sounds like somebody else had the same idea