Guardian.UK – In a nine-day challenge run by Darpa, the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, members of the public are being offered a grand prize of $40,000 if they successfully use the internet and social networks to track down a series of balloons hidden across America.
Under the rules of the competition, known as the Darpa Network Challenge, 10 large red balloons will be launched simultaneously at secret location across the United States tomorrow. Players have until December 14 to find out where they were located, and the first person – or group of people – to track them all down will scoop the jackpot, the equivalent of more than £24,000.
The rules are relatively loose: the balloons, which each measure eight feet in diameter, will be placed at fixed locations that are easily accessible and visible from nearby roads but will only be visible for one day. More than 300 teams have already signed up to take part and officials expect a number – from offering a reward online to sifting through various social networking sites to scan for sightings of the balloons.
“The most innovative ideas we probably haven’t heard about yet, because there is an incentive to keep them secret,” said Peter Lee, director of the agency’s transformational convergence technology office.
On the surface, the premise seems a little wacky for a government agency that uses its annual budget of more than $3bn to create technology for use by the US military. After all, the organisation, has helped fund technological breakthroughs such as the internet and unmanned aerial vehicles in its different incarnations over the years.
But despite the whimsical nature of the task, Darpa officials say they are not running the challenge for fun.
According to the event’s organisers, the challenge is an attempt to find out more about how large-scale problems can be solved by using the net and social networks to enhance “timely communication, wide-area team building and urgent mobilisation”.
The idea is that through observing how the various groups attempting the task fare, the organisation will learn a significant amount about the way computer systems and popular websites can be used to harness collective intelligence.
“We are not interested in the balloons – we already know where those are,” said the group’s deputy director, Norman Whitaker. “It’s the techniques people use to solve the challenge we’re focused on.”
A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has won a $44,000 prize by finding the locations of 10 red balloons across the United States.
The competition was launched by the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, to assess the accuracy with which information spreads on the internet.
A spokeswoman says researchers want to see if social networking sites should be considered credible sources of information.
The red balloons were moored at 10 locations across the US. MIT won by being the first to submit the correct coordinates of each balloon.
More than 4,000 groups registered to take part.
“DARPA salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than nine hours after balloon launch,” said the agency director, Regina Dugan.
Organisers of the MIT team say they will split the prize money among the people who helped – either by finding balloons, or inviting others who did find them – and donate any unclaimed money to charity.
The challenge was held to mark the 40th anniversary of the ARPANet, the precursor of today’s internet.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/06/2763257.htm?section=justin
A spokeswoman says researchers want to see if social networking sites should be considered credible sources of information.
I consider social networks as almost credible as wiki, it might be a good place to start but one must dig and search deeper and wider.
of interest if no money was involved.
Geeks love a challenge