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."
I sense. I sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I sense. I sense... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lets discuss a serious entry? (Score:2, Insightful)
Most major roadways (at least in my moderately sized city of around 4 million) have traffic cameras all up and down them that are freely accessible. I'm guessing this would be a valid strategy - run image analysis on all of the traffic cams you can get your hands on for red balloons.
Wouldn't surprise me if this is what the purpose of the contest is - to get someone to develop this software for them.
Re:One person? (Score:3, Insightful)
It probably is some kind of social experiment to see who people trust over the Internet and under time pressure.
Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd say it's a bargain. Think about all the driving and snacks, hell, maybe even consumer gadget purchases this contest will inspire. Those have gotta be worth something to the economy. Maybe the next stimulus package should be a scavenger hunt.
My guess: half of a high-tech vs low-tech contest (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is, we're seeing half of a contest pitting high-end defense technology vs the "stupid cheap easy" solution.
SCENE: PENTAGON STAFF ROOM
Mil Contractor: "And so you see, with our latest satellite imaging systems, we can search and pinpoint the location of a human-sized target object within 10 days for a nation the size of the US or Russia."
Dumb General: "Wow. We need to spend some billions on this."
Smart General: "Pff. I bet you could do better by plain old "boots on the ground" spywork. You'd need a pretty big network of observers though..."
Smart 5-star general: "Well, boys, let's find out."
at least, this is a good enough story that I *hope* it's what's going on...
Men who stare at goats. Jedi warrior training... (Score:2, Insightful)
I thought that the mind / clairvoyance study had been axed. I see they are reviving it.
http://movies.apple.com/movies/overture/themenwhostareatgoats/themenwhostareatgoats-clip1_480p.mov [apple.com]
Re:I sense. I sense... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One person? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the problem is who gets the prize..
And that's the stumbling block, preventing widespread collaboration..
Set up your collective to donate to a charity, or the EFF, or Cowboy Neal... or something worthwhile.
Go on.. it'll be more fun than a LUG meeting.
How hard can it be to mobilise tens of thousands of Nerds..
(Unless its really windy.. these suckers arent getting to Australia.. so I cant help..)
They should release 99 luftballoons! Sorry. Unecessary 80's flash back there..
Re:The Purpose (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Social media test? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Floating? (Score:1, Insightful)
It's just to celebrate the birth of the Internet by hosting an event that requires participants to utilize the Internet. Not everything DARPA does has a clear research objective. Also, considering the rates for research grants, this is a bargain basement price. Consider the fact that tuition + overhead + stipend for a single PhD student will cost over $80,000/year at many schools and that the average duration of a PhD is over 5 years, and you see that DARPA has no actual research agenda here. The real goal is publicity and a bit of fun.
Re:One person? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One person? (Score:5, Insightful)
The DARPA Network Challenge explores the unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve tough problems.
That is, it's not about disparate strangers coordinating quickly, as might be useful in, say, a natural crisis like an earthquake or hurricane or missing child, but networks of social trust. If they just wanted to see how fast people could put together an ad hoc information network, I bet they'd get less wrong answers submitted and the right answer submitted much sooner if there were no prize involved - people would be free with the information because it would just be a game. There'd be no incentive for deception or secrecy.
I'm guessing DARPA doesn't care about that. That's why they've got $40k on the line- not to promote communication, but to promote disinformation. They don't want to know who can build a network with modern technology, they want to know how people will build a network of trust when there's a serious incentive for betrayal.
Re:Wiretapping? So what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Warrants aren't really necessary when you're dealing with freely available public API's for the services in question. It's public speech, not private property.
If you were coordinating the information on your personal website behind a secure login, you would probably have a valid argument, otherwise you've really got nothing to get riled up over.
Re:One person? (Score:5, Insightful)
Betrayal is also a function of who makes up the ad hoc network, that is whether it is truly spontaneous and ad hoc among the general population or whether it arises within an existing network. My bet is that if the prize is won at all, it will be within a network that already exists. The general population is too diffuse and unorganized to gather all the data and organize and filter it.
Therefore you can examine various groups and their characteristics and determine the odds of betrayal. For example, if the B-tards decide to go after the prize, the odds of betrayal are essentially unity. (But their self generated noise level would probably prevent them from winning.) If the Boy Scouts decide to do so, the odds of betrayal go way down. (Bit I don't know if the Boy Scouts have the reasonably centralized and connected communications network need to make this work.)
Re:Floating? (Score:3, Insightful)
Regardless of what their intentions are, they're gathering data on us. How we react, how quickly, how cohesively, whether we react at all, etc. That's the thing about sociological experiments; they always produce data.
The data will be useful. It won't help bring a man to Mars, or fight terrorists in Afghanistan, but it will be useful in some way, shape or form. What they may then do is, based on the responses or lack thereof to this challenge, modify their next sociological experiment to hopefully attain a different dataset.
Re:Floating? (Score:3, Insightful)
But honestly, this discussion would not be nearly as amusing without the paranoia of /. getting turned up to 11.
Paranoia my ass! Can't you read man? They want us to help them develop methods to control us!!!
The best thing we can do is take those balloons out or put up a lot of extra red balloons on test day.
Re:Social media test? (Score:1, Insightful)
Hokay, I've read this post twice and I still can't figure out two things:
1) What this guy is talking about
2) How he got modded to 3