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
I am game, it seems that there will be ten red balloons displayed for one day that we have to find. I wonder how good the satellite setting of google maps would be? Do they update daily?
They might have already thought of this in some respects. Like they have certain balloons with some symbol on them. They could probably sue you if they found out that you did this. As much as $40,000 sounds like fun, I don’t think I’ll risk it.
Wouldn’t it be funny if they put one in the Manchester millyards.
I agree 100%. Mind you, I mostly agree because of the success rate on figuring out game hints.
This is a hugely complex challenge… satellite survelliance isn’t likely to be enough, as a tethered balloon can easily disappear under cloud cover… so even if you were to have daily updated images you’d likely still have a challenge ahead of you.
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’
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.
