Find DARPA's Balloons, Win $40K

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."

Comments

One person?

[paul248]

So, only one person wins the prize, even though it will almost certainly require the effort of an online community? This sounds like a breeding ground for betrayal.

Re:One person?

[Yvan256]

Maybe that's the actual goal of that challenge. Not how people will find the balloons but how people will cooperate together if there's only a single prize to be won.

Re:One person?

[paul248]

Actually, I was thinking more about that. A public online community will help you find all the real coordinates quickly, but there will undoubtedly be a lot of *fake* coordinates mixed in.

I think the real challenge won't be in finding the balloons, it will be in validating and filtering out all the non-balloons.

Re:One person?

[dynamo52]

Possibly to determine if they are able to focus in on an unknown individual who has managed to acquire certain specific information in a timely manner. I could see many anti-terrorism implications in an experiment of this nature.

Re:Floating?

[Fluffeh]

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.

The possible things come to mind:
Gather intelligence on how quickly people are able to come together to form a working group, and what the structure of the group is likely to be.

Find new and interesting ways for this sort of huge area recon. Can a geek use roadway cameras effectively? Are there other ways of gathering this sort of information?

Test some software that they have written to trawl the web searching for specific words among the randomness of the intertubez.

Any other ideas come floating to mind?

Social media test?

[icebike]

Since nobody drives everywhere in the country this has got to be some sort of social media test, to see how fast something like twitter could track down any given item/phenomena.

Defense research angle?

Nothing to do with the balloons is my bet.

Not even measuring how long this might take, or how people do it, because they already know the only way is via the internet.

I suspect they want to watch the internet and see what happens when people start organizing spontaneously into communities.

This is an exercise in traffic analysis. Pure and simple.

The scary part, is they have the hooks into the net deep enough that they can pull this off, apparently without warrants. Yes They Can.

Re:I sense. I sense...

[KibibyteBrain]

That's probably the point. DARPA wants to demonstrate empirically that mobile communications have reached the point where ordinary people can coordinate using ordinary technology to achieve what would historically have needed to be a fine tuned professional intelligence operation.