DARPA Network Challenge Win $40K

[SamC]

Originally Posted by caffel

Team 423 proposes a collective effort on the part of FIRST teams.
Report a balloon location to us.
The first team to report each good one gets one share in the $.
If I get a few responses, I will make a team entry with DARPA: 'FIRST Consortium for DARPA'

Charlie Affel, Mentor, 423
caffel@aol.com

I think this is the basic idea originally proposed by Greg...

[edit]
From the Facebook group previously posted

Originally Posted by Group Info Tab

The way I propose dealing with the prize money is we split it by how ever many people find the balloons at a specific location. So since the prize is $40k Divide that by 10 locations, Each location is worth 4k. So if 4 people find a specific balloon each one gets $1k etc. I am all for donating this money to charity but those people involved should get to choose what they use it for.

[sanddrag]

Not to deflate the excitement here, but I would be quite surprised if anyone in FIRST actually found any of the balloons at all. Think about it. Yes, FIRST is big, but it's not THAT big. There are a lot more areas without FIRST than there are with it. And of all the people in FIRST, only a small fraction visit this site regularly. Think about this too: The balloon could be one block from your house, and if it was a block in the direction you never drove, you'd never know it was there.

The balloons will be found by the entire informed and online population of the US as a whole. The person to claim the prize will be the one with the best real-time monitoring and verification of reports of these balloons. I doubt even if you had one million people specifically on the lookout for these all day long, that they alone would find more than 5. The country is just too large.

As we speak, sophisticated code is probably being written to track, analyze, and log any mention of a red balloon on ALL of the internet's most popular real-time places (such as this forum). The winner will be the person/group that is able to obtain, organize, and verify the results of their massive web-crawl the fastest, while placing decoy information all over the internet simultaneously.

[Fe_Will]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

As we speak, sophisticated code is probably being written to track, analyze, and log any mention of a red balloon on ALL of the internet's most popular real-time places (such as this forum). The winner will be the person/group that is able to obtain, organize, and verify the results of their massive web-crawl the fastest, while placing decoy information all over the internet simultaneously.

And that's why it's a network challenge...

[Eugene Fang]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

...while placing decoy information all over the internet simultaneously.

Now that wouldn't be graciously professional!

But unfortunately, most of the world out there wouldn't know that...