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

I sense. I sense...

[ColdWetDog]

An unholy mashup between Twitter and a bunch of cell phone cameras.

Re:I sense. I sense...

[Mattwolf7]

It's kind of the point: "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."

Re:I sense. I sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to disappoint, but this is only 10 Luftballons.
I think you were looking for 99 of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/99_Luftballons

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.

Re:I sense. I sense...

[izomiac]

That has some interesting applications. Whereas it might take hundreds or thousands of UAVs/aircraft to locate these balloons, a sympathetic population might very well be able to do it for a fraction of the cost and risk. Who knows, maybe the next time we're occupying a country the military might give out free cell phones to generate a little good will and put the population to work finding our enemies.

Re:Oh great....don't fall for it everyone!

[bennomatic]

Shhhh! It's for the TV show!

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?

[polymeris]

It probably is some kind of social experiment to see who people trust over the Internet and under time pressure.

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:One person?

[tdvaughan]

Actually, the real challenge will be stopping people from placing fake balloons that look just like the real ones. It's what I would do if I really wanted to win the prize.

Re:One person?

[Phat_Tony]

This contest absolutely is not about using technology to coordinate, as is roughly implied in DARPA's statement

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:One person?

[DerekLyons]

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.

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.)

Indentifying the Balloons

[NuclearError]

Here's a handy chart for finding the balloons.

Not Enough Red Ballons

[kaleth]

There should have been 99.

This can't end well.

[ipc0nfig]

A big red balloon with guys waiting around it all day, yeah, that's not going to freak anyone out.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/31/boston.bombscare/index.html

Hmmm - strategies and counter-strategies.

[KingJackaL]

Well, it's obvious why DARPA would care how quickly the internet can become aware of accurate and specific information such as 'where is unit X'.

What I'm curious about is how much mis-information could pop up. What if you mischievously set up your own balloon, that looks identical to the description, as a distraction to other teams/groups?

What if groups eventually find all the balloons - and there are 13 of them? Is it then time to unleash the perl scripts on DARPA's submission form? So many possible strategies and counter-strategies - but are they actually all just intellectual, or will they play a role in the challenge?

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?

Possible strategy

[ErikPeterson]

I think the best way to attack this problem would be to agree to donate the profits from the award to some worthy cause, letting people with the capability volunteer some time to a solution. Its a fairly complicated problem to solve for the amount of money given to solve it. Lets say a group of capable programmers united for lets say an open source project develop a website that takes in the coordinates in the format required for the contest. The trick is going to be figuring out who is telling the truth when it comes to submitted data... You may be able to assume that if a number set is entered often that it is a candidate to be the real location. The task obviously requires coordination of many life humans as I doubt anyone that can compete has access to satellite time to do an automated search. I am wondering how many people will attempt to put up fake balloon sites to either trick their competition or just get some publicity of tech people to come visit the site and take a GPS reading.

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:Social media test?

[spleen_blender]

I was following you until the part about warrants. What are you thinking could possibly require one that is related to this?

Nothing better to use $40,000 for?

[kheldan]

The economy still sucks, DARPA; why are you wasting taxpayer money on bullshit like this?

Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for?

[blankinthefill]

The average person may think that $40,000 is a lot... but it's nothing in terms of operating budgets for even medium sized companies. From the Darpa site, looking at their unclassified budget for 2010 ( http://www.darpa.mil/Docs/2010PBDARPAMay2009.pdf ) (That's a PDF, by the way, and also has numbers for 2009 and 2008), you can see that the budget easily runs into the billions of dollars. For a comparison, forty thousand dollars is 0.004 PERCENT of one billion dollars. To someone with a salary of seventy five thousand dollars a year, the equivalent percentage would be 3 dollars. That's barely pocket change, and it assumes a budget much lower than the actual operating budget of DARPA. Taking this into consideration, that's pretty cheap. Especially if they're planning to study anything by doing this (and if you think they wont get SOMETHING useful out of this, then you're even denser than I am), that's a relative bargain. Even if they DON'T get anything worthwhile out of this contest, the publicity alone is probably worth it when you consider possible recruits that they attract because of increased interest. Your claim that they are 'wasting taxpayer money' is pure FUD, and, to be honest, even if it wasn't, $40k isn't even a drop in the bucket of the 2.3 TRILLION dollars that was collected in taxes in 2008.

Re:Nothing better to use $40,000 for?

[kheldan]

*facepalm*

Re:Floating?

[davester666]

Obviously, this is just an attempt to use crowdsourcing to find a bunch of lost weather balloons. In this day and age of gov't budget cutbacks, every balloon saved is a slightly bigger performance bonus at the end of the year...

Re:Floating?

[Skevin]

Or maybe each of the ten weather balloons may or may not have a live six-year-old boy riding in it, and DARPA full well remembers what happened last time with just *one*.

Solomon

My guess: half of a high-tech vs low-tech contest

[goodmanj]

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...

The Purpose

[ral]

The purpose of this exercise can be found here:

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.

Re:The Purpose

[dynamo52]

The publicly stated purpose of this exercise can be found here: [fixed that for you]

Re:Floating?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no real point to it. Here's what they did: There are five balloons around, numbered from 1-5, and four balloons numbered from 7-10. Just like the prank where you release a 3 pigs, painted with a "1", "3", and "4" into a high school.

They're just 5 months early.

Re:Floating?

[TubeSteak]

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:Floating?

[Bob9113]

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?

I was going to post the same question and propose items 1 and 3. I was going to compare this to the intentional disinformation we sent in WWII using encryption we suspected to be compromised -- it gave us excellent intel on the ability of the axis to deploy a fighting force. It fits nicely with the idea that in sociological testing it is important to disguise the actual nature of the test, so that the respondents do not alter the outcome (consciously or subconsciously).

In that case, you've just broken their experiment.

But then, perhaps that is not what they are observing. Perhaps they figured out that we would figure out the actual meaning of the challenge, and what they are actually measuring is the rate at which we perceive the actual intent of the challenge... :)

Decoys

[slasho81]

What happens if people start setting their own balloons as decoys?

Re:Decoys

[slasho81]

A decoy doesn't have to be perfect. If it's good enough to distract, it's a good decoy.

Re:Floating?

[tomhudson]

This would have been a good stunt to get people to buy Motorola Droids so they can use the free google maps geolocation, etc.

Re:Floating?

[jackspenn]

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.

Re:Floating?

[JWSmythe]

    I think there's a lot more to this.

    What are they observing?

    * Establish a geographically diverse target (10 balloons somewhere in the US).

    * Observe how the organizers encourage people to work with them.

    * Observe how they communicate with the search teams, coordinate efforts, and disseminate data.

    This could be used to coordinate efforts between the military and civilians, should the need arise. In the sake of the great terrorism debate, what if a vehicle was known to be in the US, and it is expected to detonate a nuke on US soil. This kind of crowdsourcing would have a better chance of finding it than putting everyone in the law enforcement and intelligence communities on the road hunting.

    Unfortunately, this is probably organized towards the handling and neutralization of civilian unrest inside the CONUS. It would:

    * Identify civilians who can organize large groups to neutralize them.
    * Identify communications routes that would need to be neutralized.
    * Identify intelligence breaches that could be used by the dissidents.

    So, it's all in how much you trust our government. Would they recruit the civilian population to assist in a time of need? Would they neutralize dissidents during a period of civil unrest?

    I'm fairly confident I'm not on the stage 1 list (neutralize in the first hour), but I'm pretty sure I'm on the stage 2 list. I'd suspect the organizers who aren't LEO or government will be on the stage 1 list. The followers will be on the stage 2 list.

    Who wants to play the game now?

    If I happen to spot a red balloon, with a couple spooks camped out below it, I'm going to plink at it with a BB gun. :)