DARPA Network Challenge Win $40K

[kevincrispie]

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.


With the network of Team in the US I think there is a very easy chance we could win this. 40k, Perhaps if we win we could give the money to FIRST to re-grant to some teams in need. Or split it amongst the teams that helped find the balloons.

Announcement October 29, 2009
Registration Opens December 1, 2009
Balloons Launched December 5, 2009
Submission Deadline December 14, 2009

That's a ton of money. I agree, with a bunch of people from teams, there is a ton of great thinkers all around the nation.

[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

[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...

[Ted Weisse]

Another thread in th Chit-Chat discussion just started on this subject:

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=79188

[John G]

you weren't supposed to tell anyone else. now I might not win. haha

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.


With the network of Team in the US I think there is a very easy chance we could win this. 40k, Perhaps if we win we could give the money to FIRST to re-grant to some teams in need. Or split it amongst the teams that helped find the balloons.

Announcement October 29, 2009
Registration Opens December 1, 2009
Balloons Launched December 5, 2009
Submission Deadline December 14, 2009

[Wiz]

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

Join the facebook group http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=163627713147

So where is the money going? I'd suggest $1000 to each team that kicks in a location, and the balance to FIRST to use as they see fit.

[BrendanB]

I'll cover manchester...

I have SAT's tomorrow so I might just swing by the millyard to check if there are any red balloons/odd deliveries to the FIRST building.

[ATannahill]

I disagree. We are all FIRST participants but are doing this outside of FIRST, don't get confused. We are using CD and Facebook for this mission, so if any goes to support an entity besides the people working to find the ballons, it should be those two.

[johnr]

So the winner recieves 40 grand and the tax man gets,what, 25% on gambling winnings. Oh, and the winner gets bumped up to a higher tax bracket. I'm just guessing but the winner is going to be busy on april 15th looking for tax shelters.

[Ted Weisse]

Originally Posted by NickE

A MIT Team has won.

https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/

Found this in another thread...

[John G]

Of course, a group of kid's at MIT won the 40 k. kinda sad for the rest of us. Oh well.

[Ian Curtis]

It didn't necessarily have to be sad. If you reported a balloon you got $2,000 bucks, and if you referred a balloon reporter you got $1,000 bucks, and if you referred the referrer of the reporter you still got $500 bucks, so on and so forth. Pretty neat idea, obviously effective.

MIT's Red Balloon Team