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...

[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: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?

[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?

[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.

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: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?

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...

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...

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.

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.