The Soviet Union introduced a special envelope for mailing letters in 1971. The envelopes contained standardized boxes at the bottom where the sended wrote out out the digits by connecting the dots. The intention of the GOST R 51506-99 standard was to make these envelopes machine readable. I have not been able to get any information about how the Soviet postal code optical character recoginition machines worked. So, I wanted to see if I could come up with a way to read the postal code from a grainy image. What started out as a simple project turned out to be a journey into finding an algorithm that could distinguish signal from the noise in wonky images, and then disambiguate between confusable pairs. This would've been much easier in the Soviet days, though. Because, in Soviet Russia, the algorithm finds you.