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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

What is up with this cynical comment? They tried to solve the problem and it turned out to be not feasible. Just because they failed doesn't mean trying was bad. I suggest learning about the concept of "expected value".

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If you knew anything about the European funding landscape, you'd know that a 6 million Euro project is an enormous amount of money for a project with only one institute involved.

Compare that for instance with the Horizon 2020 project "RePAIR – Reconstructing the Past: AI and Robotics Meet Cultural Heritag", which ran for almost 5 years, had a budget of only 3.5 million Euros and that money was divided among six(!) different partners.

Maybe that gives a little bit of a perspective on "expected value".

2020 is a significantly later date, meaning the fast moving field of machine learning was in a much better state by then. Moreover, the project you mentioned might have been far smaller in scope. The scope of the Stasi document reconstruction is anything but small. They talk about "400 to 600 million fragments which represent around 40 to 55 million pages."

Hard to get too worked up about that when the US govt has allocated about 500 billion to Lockheed Martin for a jet fighter. I'd honestly put the jet and the docs at about the same expected value ("what exactly is this doing for our people?").

6.5MEUR over 6 years are 1.1 per year, which pays for around 7 people at Fraunhofer, probably less because there will be equipment cost.

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