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Uncle Sam wants you (and a bunch of your buddies) to find 10 red balloons.
This Saturday!
Seriously.
DARPA is the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. Perhaps best-known for supporting the development of ARPANet, which led to today's Internet and World Wide Web (a vast oversimplification of the history, but you get the idea), DARPA funds innovative research in a range of areas. This fall, DARPA has issued the DARPA Network Challenge to see just how good this social media stuff really is. (Actually, I don't know for sure what their objective is, but that's almost certainly part of it.) Here's the deal:
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.$40,000 will be awarded to the first person to submit the locations (latitude and longitude) of all 10 balloons. Here's the best part:
The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.
"The balloons will only be visible during daylight hours on Saturday, December 5."
So this coming Saturday, it seems that teams of people will be fanning out all over the country scouting for the red balloons. Meanwhile, presumably, scores of people will also be staying in near their computers collecting and scanning for information, leads, and tips that circulate on the Internet. And surely there will be false information propagated as well, to throw other teams off the trail. And maybe someone will even place decoy balloons out to confuse people. I suspect the post-mortem on this sort of exercise could be fascinating.
In just a bit of quick Googling I've come across wikis and Facebook groups and several Twitter accounts about it. People are developing websites to coordinate their teams with names like theredballoons.com and spotbigred.com and redballoonrace.com. This is an interesting analysis about what it will probably take to win. Here's another that is a more pessmistic about whether all 10 ballons will be found. It is a wonderfully easy problem to state, but it raises loads of fascinating questions when trying to figure out how to solve it.
One question I have is what methodology DARPA is using to determine where to place the balloons -- random dart-throwing at the map of the United States or something more planned? I also wonder how many companies actually make red weather balloons? How small do they become for travel? Are DARPA employees going to be checking them as baggage on commercial flights to get to the destinations where they'll be moored? (In which case, baggage handlers might be an interesting source of data.) For more reading, here's a Metafilter thread with some interesting discussion about the project.
At heart it's the geographic scale of the search space coupled with the very short timeframe that makes all of this such a nifty challenge. I look forward to reading about whether and how people solve it.
So this coming Saturday, it seems that teams of people will be fanning out all over the country scouting for the red balloons. Meanwhile, presumably, scores of people will also be staying in near their computers collecting and scanning for information, leads, and tips that circulate on the Internet. And surely there will be false information propagated as well, to throw other teams off the trail. And maybe someone will even place decoy balloons out to confuse people. I suspect the post-mortem on this sort of exercise could be fascinating.
In just a bit of quick Googling I've come across wikis and Facebook groups and several Twitter accounts about it. People are developing websites to coordinate their teams with names like theredballoons.com and spotbigred.com and redballoonrace.com. This is an interesting analysis about what it will probably take to win. Here's another that is a more pessmistic about whether all 10 ballons will be found. It is a wonderfully easy problem to state, but it raises loads of fascinating questions when trying to figure out how to solve it.
One question I have is what methodology DARPA is using to determine where to place the balloons -- random dart-throwing at the map of the United States or something more planned? I also wonder how many companies actually make red weather balloons? How small do they become for travel? Are DARPA employees going to be checking them as baggage on commercial flights to get to the destinations where they'll be moored? (In which case, baggage handlers might be an interesting source of data.) For more reading, here's a Metafilter thread with some interesting discussion about the project.
At heart it's the geographic scale of the search space coupled with the very short timeframe that makes all of this such a nifty challenge. I look forward to reading about whether and how people solve it.
One team claims they've already found one. Do they have some inside scoop that others don't? http://www.tenredballoons.com
Either way, it's an interesting exercise. I hope I see one on Saturday.
Posted by: Susan | Thursday, December 03, 2009 at 10:53 AM
I am skeptical that they've already found one, since DARPA says the balloons won't be launched until December 5th. Unless, of course, they started finding and following DARPA staff members who'll be stationed with the balloons. There are a few other possibilities, too.. but I don't believe the balloons themselves are visible as weather balloons yet. Unless.... DARPA's *lying*. Hehe.. oh, the wheels within wheels.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see whether tenredballoons has something real or not.
Posted by: Lyn | Thursday, December 03, 2009 at 11:54 AM
We have a link to a real DARPA red balloon photo on our website if you want to see what one looks like: http://www.red-balloons.com
Posted by: Jon Cannell | Thursday, December 03, 2009 at 04:43 PM
Join the MIT team, invite your friends and you can win money, help
science, and help charity!
Find all the information about our approach at
http://balloon.media.mit.edu/
THANK YOU AND... GOOD LUCK!
The MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team
Posted by: MIT | Thursday, December 03, 2009 at 05:11 PM
TenRedBalloons is sniffing helium. If you look, the countdown clock on their website is wrong by several hours. I wouldn't put any faith in their already-psychically-found balloons.
My Team, DeciNena (think of the 80's song about 99 Red Balloons) is one of the best-organized and fastest growing, and we are now incorporating other teams into our web site.
We are offering to share part of the prize money with all particpants who are active on Dec 5th, not JUST the actual balloon finder (who will receive a larger reward).
Join us, and tell all your friends. That's what the whole goal of the challenge is -- to build large teams quickly.
http://decinena.com
Posted by: A Facebook User | Friday, December 04, 2009 at 01:01 PM
Go DeciNena!
Posted by: phdpnz | Friday, December 04, 2009 at 02:14 PM
This team seems to be the most organized so far:
http://balloon.media.mit.edu/speigg
Posted by: ciregh | Friday, December 04, 2009 at 06:10 PM
Wow! It seems to be an exciting one! I wonder who won there?
Posted by: Parenting Magazine | Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 01:11 PM