Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K 252
coondoggie writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency today offered up a rather interesting challenge: find and plot 10 red weather balloons scattered at undisclosed locations across the country. The first person to identify the location of all the balloons and enter them on the challenge Web site will win a $40,000 cash prize. According to the agency, the balloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives. All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM on Saturday, December 5, 2009."
Re:Indentifying the Balloons (Score:3, Informative)
Now, that was funny!
The Purpose (Score:4, Informative)
To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting 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.
Using satellite imagery (Score:2, Informative)
Here's a [digitalglobe.com]sample image. [digitalglobe.com] Yes, that's from orbit.
Each satellite images about 1 million km^2 per day, so in 250 days, they can image the entire planet at high resolution. But they'll do the populated parts of the US more often (they can aim the cameras for each pass), so they will pick up many of the balloons.
Microsoft Bing is buying all the data, so it's going on line. The data rate is about 50GB/hour. Start programs looking for red dots.
Re:Floating? (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what the agenda here is. It's surely not something as simple as finding how many people jump in their cars and go driving.
FTFA:
The DARPA Network Challenge is designed to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet. "It is fitting for DARPA to announce this competition on the anniversary of the day that the first message was sent over the ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet," said Dr. Regina E. Dugan, who made the announcement at a conference celebrating the anniversary. "In the 40 years since this breakthrough, the Internet has become an integral part of society and the global economy. The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems."
But honestly, this discussion would not be nearly as amusing without the paranoia of /. getting turned up to 11.
Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Decoys (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Help me find them! (Score:1, Informative)
This type of site simply will not work. Any random person can take all the answer for themselves and post them on another site or attempt to collect the prize by themselves.
You need an actual collaborative effort and a single trustworthy person to manage everyone. That manager would need to be trusted by random people because they could simply get all the answers and collect the prize themselves. Someone well known and trusted (famous) might have better luck in this role.
Good luck.
Re:Floating? (Score:3, Informative)
I always love this idea.
CCTV cameras don't feed into a centralized computer somewhere. Hell, in many commercial buildings with more than one tenant, even they don't share camera feeds.
Even traffic light cameras feed to the organization that installed them. Some news stations have their own cameras, and frequently city transportation offices have their own.
I'd love to get access to "the place" that has all the cameras, but that's yet another myth created and reinforced by television, where they wrote themselves into a corner, and needed some slick way to get out of it. They're also the same crowd that makes you believe you can take a blurry distant picture of a vehicle, that may only be 8px wide, and be able to enhance it enough to read the license plate number, and see the dumb look on the drivers face. Nope, that doesn't happen either, but it helps the story on TV. Hell, I was watching NCIS the other night, and with a satellite image, they were able to enhance it to get a clear full screen view of just the license plate, from an event that happened days before. And for reference, the highest resolution satellite that they have is 0.41 meters. That is, you can see that there is a 41cm object, but you wouldn't be able to read the writing on it. You probably could read a large building sign, or large lettering on a billboard, except the letters are facing the wrong way. :)
Re:Floating? (Score:3, Informative)
Either way we could have a lot of fun with this, we just need a few red balloons and volunteers to be "DARPA agents". Yes, of course we could just post disinformation, but wouldn't it be more fun to get participants to post disinformation with conviction and confidence be behind it? F'en with people is so fun.
OK, good to go -- I've just ordered three red weather balloons on eBay. :)
http://cgi.ebay.com/3-Red-Weather-Balloons-3-ft-30-Gram-Meteorological-New_W0QQitemZ120480696030QQcmdZViewItemQQimsxZ20091015?IMSfp=TL091015191003r33317 [ebay.com]