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US Spurs Plethora of Problem Solving Prizes
coondoggie writes "Got a complicated problem? Hold a prize competition to solve it. That's the basic idea behind the America Competes Act, renewed by Congress this week. According to the White House's Office of Science and Technology, the Competes Act gives every department and agency the authority to conduct prize competitions. Prizes and challenges have an excellent track record of accelerating problem-solving by tapping America's top talent and best expertise."
Prizes posted by royalty were used in previous centuries to solve things like finding longitude whilst navigating at sea.
"Prizes and challenges have an excellent track record of accelerating problem-solving by tapping America's top talent and best expertise." ... and are cheap too because instead of paying people to solve it, you let a multitude of people do it in their free time, and then you pay the winner a set amount regardless of how long it took or what it actually cost. Everyone else gets nothing, regardless of how much time they spend, or what their expenses were.
I'm surprised scientists get sucked into this stuff, its about as sensible as playing the lottery, and self-destructive to the viability of one's own profession.
We're already seeing prize models for logo and website design...
Yes, but one could argue incentive for critical thought and problem-solving skills among today's youth pays dividends down the road.
It was pretty much inevitable that reward of government contracts would eventually devolve into hand-to-hand combat.
Ave, Caesar, morituri te salutamus.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I'm sure having problem solving competitions accelerates the process of solving a particular problem, if for no other reason than drawing more attention and prestige to that problem. However, I'm curious if competitions really have an effect on the number of people who pursue careers in math, physics, etc. I mean does anyone really go "man, I'm going to become a mathematician and get rich through these competitions." I know people often go into the sciences for love rather than money, but I don't see how these competitions would make people love science and math more.
You have some data to back this up ?
You have some real data to back this up, like some detailed comparison of 40 problems, with 20 solved by prize method and 20 solved by some other method ?
I don't know if prizes are good or not; I know that argument by anecdote (x prize foundation....) is not a good substitute for thinking
There is also a difference between a "solution" and a "solution" - it is easy to get something to work once for the prize committee; a lot harder to make it work many times, at a reasonable cost.
No you're supposed to do it for a share of a dinette set plus the personal satisfaction you get from solving problems and the prestige and recognition of being the guy who beat everyone else at doing it.
Fyi, people actually pay for the opportunity to compete in triathlons, and most of them aren't even expecting to win. The ones who do don't receive much in the way of compensation for the time they've invested in it. And yet hundreds of people still show up to do it.
If you're not in the spirit of the game then it may not seem very equitable to you, but good news! It's 100% voluntary, so no need for you to worry about it.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This is a classic example of this trend. Various government agencies spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get autonomous ground vehicles off the ground (so to speak). For under $50 million, DARPA conducted three events from 2004 - 2007 and spurred technology that is now being deployed in trucks, cars, boats, for 3-D mapping, and many other uses.
They say that to improve your user interface design add a high score file. Everybody loves a competition!
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Huh? That's exactly what American politicians do: they govern according to the actual interests of their constituents, the Corporations, who provide them with generous "campaign donations".
No you're supposed to do it for a share of a dinette set plus the personal satisfaction you get from solving problems and the prestige and recognition of being the guy who beat everyone else at doing it.
I get all that anyway, but I deserve $150K, not a fucking dinette set.
Fyi, people actually pay for the opportunity to compete in triathlons, and most of them aren't even expecting to win. The ones who do don't receive much in the way of compensation for the time they've invested in it. And yet hundreds of people still show up to do it.
That's nice for them. But the people who win make MILLIONS OF FUCKING DOLLARS doing it and rarely have to pay their own entry fee, besides.
If you're not in the spirit of the game then it may not seem very equitable to you, but good news! It's 100% voluntary, so no need for you to worry about it.
It's not 100% voluntary. The government is sucking the value of innovation out of the economy by paying in dinette sets instead of what it's worth.
However, history teaches us that judges don't like innovative solutions to the problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_prize
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harrison
the Competes Act gives every department and agency the authority to conduct prize competitions
Prize competitons, puzzles, solutions. It sounds a bit like innocentive, which is a more global thing that has been running for the past 9 years.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The DARPA Grand Challenge was actually Dr. Tony Tether's way of getting a message through to the academic robotics community - "get results or else". DARPA had been putting money into robotics work, and specific automatic driving work, at MIT, Stanford, and CMU since the 1960s, without getting anything that was close to useful. When the Grand Challenge was first announced, all three of those schools didn't intend to enter, and in fact, months into the competition, none of them had. Many non-academic entrants had signed up, but the big schools weren't in it.
Then something happened. I gather that it was made clear to the major research groups that if the Grand Challenge resulted in better technology than what DARPA had received from academia, academic funding would be turned off. Suddenly, all three schools cranked up huge efforts, tying up a substantial fraction of their CS departments. Nobody had ever had 100-person crash programs in academic robotics before, let alone ones funded by the universities themselves.
It worked. But it wasn't the carrot of winning that drove the major schools. The prize was only $1 million. It was the big stick of funding cuts.
There are a few options for a government or other large organization to get something important and difficult done.
1. Assign the task to whatever part of your org chart this falls under. Uncountable billions and years later, you'll have a semi functional disappointment. NASA has proven this several times.
2. Contract it out to a major company, picked in some bidding process. The results are slightly better than (1), but still very bad.
3. Announce a prize of 1% of what you would have spent in (1), and you'll likely have a solution in 1/3 of the time.
This is because with prizes, whoever is best suited to solve the problem, in the whole world, can do so without having to convince your bureaucrats of their ideas, and make a profit doing so.
It's one of the very few effective ways to work around natural bureaucracy inertia.
What this is, is an excuse for government not to pay people for work. Prizes and challenges have an excellent track record of impoverishing America's top talent and best expertise, and making the next generation unable to afford to educate themselves to innovate.
In short: fuck this; range your Congresscritter.
And some people actually *enjoy* their starvation, and do not need food for their children in exchange for *everything* they do . Plus, even if they don't win, they at least get to believe that they did something to better mankind while watching their children be eaten by the rich.