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DARPA Network Challenge Lasts All of 9 Hours
stillnotelf writes "A team based at MIT has won the DARPA Network Challenge. DARPA notes: 'The Challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue, and, we hope, is part of a growing "renaissance of wonder" throughout the nation,' said DARPA's director, Dr. Regina E. Dugan. 'DARPA salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than 9 hours after balloon launch.' PDF with (scant) details. Hit the first link above for a map with the locations. How many did your team find?"
Team Nerdfighter found 9/10 balloons
http://twitter.com/hankgreen/status/6392128271
:(
We found them all within fifteen minutes but we sold the information about this secret DARPA project to China for $400,000. I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
How many times has that guy had angioplasty?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Right. Get off slashdot. Now. Thank you.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
I sure do hope there's some irony in your post I'm not caching.
DARPA is an acronym standing for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
It is an agency of the US Department of Defense it develops tech for the army.
It's predecessor ARPA gave us the internet amongst other things(too condensed a statement).
They like to issue challenges and geeks of all trades either like to participate in them for the sport and/or are picked from the crowd and given jobs at DARPA to develop new cutting edge technologies.
Well reading the previous article about MITs solution to this challenge would be a good start.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Come on, couldn't they have a least made it 99 red balloons? Was DARPA afraid they might accidently start a nuclear war?
Here's the answer. I was wondering the same thing myself. It appears that the solution was very low tech: just get a bunch of people, and when they see a balloon, send a message to the group. Instead of splitting the 40k among the group, they donated it to charity. Reward for MIT? Bragging rights.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
I sure do hope there's some irony in your post I'm not caching.
Irony typically has a short TTL; you're better off not caching it.
So how was this a technical challenge, and not just a boyscout fox hunt ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
I was surprised that UPS didn't have a team and won. Seems they would have had the most people out and about and probably seeing the balloons.
Is this some kind of bizarro version of the ignorance normally attributed to stupid North Americans (USians)? Stereotypically, US citizens are characterized as deeply ignorant of history and current events outside of the US. In this case people outside of the US, on a forum as technologically current as Slashdot, can claim justified ignorance of one of the entities that gave rise to the Internet?
The mind, it has to boggle.
blog
MIT used the pyramid scheme. You don't have to find a balloon, just get 5 people under you to find 5 people and so on.
It's not MIT tactics... It's AMWAY tactics...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And obviously slashdot has readers who don't know about TCP/IP.
So that's how the Internet works! I always thought it was a series of tubes.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
This is more like a radio station promotion. It would have worked if one of those blowhards on AM talk radio had announced a similar hunt with a call-in number. It didn't need the Internet.
Can't Stop the Signal.
The problem with your paranoia is that information is a tool that does far far more damage to "bad" type governments (theocracies, dictatorships, oligarchies, etc.) than it does to democracies (or democratic republics or other "good" type governments).
Unlike other weapons systems, information has preferential kill for the stuff you want to kill. Nukes, cluster bombs, bat-bombs, land mines, and AKs don't, they can be used to destroy anybody. Information, even semi-truthful information only hurts the bad guys.
So, this is one of those cases where you are getting your panties in a bunch over WHO is doing it, and not WHAT they are doing. If this were a Facebook project or some sort of flash-mob or other garbage nobody would even bring up "nefarious purposes" because it would just be a weekend diversion for the kiddies. As it turns out, diversions for the kiddies can be used to help topple brutal dictatorships.
No you are not the only one to see "nefarious" plot in it, lots of other moon bat non thinking "liberals" thought the same thing and they are just as wrong as you are.
Thanks, didn't know that. But that rule negates true crowd sourcing datamining for a project, because in a real non test situation it wouldn't matter, an org and corp, an ad hoc group, whatever, would be disseminating and collating information. As this is a defense department test, I wonder what the rationale was for the exclusions?
Going further, a google run group of volunteer balloon spotters might have done even better. Or an iPhone app, see balloon, mash button that uploads "I have seen it, here is the x-y" deal.
sarchasm - the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
- passion
Today, MIT and the United States Department of Warxxx Defense are proud to report their joint discovery that spam email, when combined with a pyramid sales scheme, is an effective way to get people off their asses. This works best when your name is well-known and has not yet been sufficiently exploited that your email is ignored.
Note to editors: when referring to spam in connection with MIT, correct usage is "social network."