Despite my better judgement , I am fascinated by DARPA’s Network Challenge. The basic idea is simple: on this Saturday, December 5th, at 10AM (EST), ten large red weather balloons with be placed in various locations in the USA. The first person to report the locations of all balloons wins $40K. This seems to be an exercise in crowdsourcing, and it is not difficult to see various reasons why the US military may be interested in such an exercise.
If you want to win, the question seems to be how to get many potential balloon-sighters to report their findings to you rather than to someone else. Offers of $1K for the first sighting of a balloon (conditioned on winning) came fast, soon to be trumped by $3K offers, which is within a factor of 4/3 from optimizing this approach. Indeed the prize amount seems to be intentionally low, as to provide barriers to this natural monetary technique. At this point, the edge of rationality, non-monetary rewards were started to be offered, like world peace or, my favorite, “use the winnings to create a giant flying cupcake built entirely out of balloons!“. My own contribution (probably discovered independently by countless others) is the observation that the monetary technique is not really limited by the prize money: winning may have significant advertising value for the right kind of company, who may invest much larger amounts of money in attracting collaborators to its effort.
An analysis of possible approaches can be found here, including some thoughts on satellite or aerial surveys and on negative tactics (mis-report balloons to your competitors) and a link to a wiki.
Actually it is not on this Saturday.
“All balloons are scheduled to go on display at all locations at 10:00AM (ET) until approximately 4:00 PM (local time) on Saturday, December 5, 2009.”
oops. thanks. fixed.
Here is another strategy: deploy 400 balloons of your own across the US at the same time, and then wait to find the 10 real balloons.
So glad you like our flying cupcake!! We updated the site a bunch http://www.findtheredballoons.com, and even added a Flying Cupcake-inator, check it out! http://bit.ly/7QTyh5
We have a strong team (I Spy a Red Balloon) that is giving all of the prize money to charity (Red Cross). If you see a red balloon in the sky on Dec. 5th, let us know at:
http://www.ispyaredballoon.com/
or at facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=201028633372
or
text: (262) I-SPY-SPY (262-477-9779)