

Darpa's latest challenge: Locate these 10 balloons - njrc
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10406752-94.html

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storborg
Here is an example attempt to solve this: <http://www.redballoonrace.com/>

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joeld42
They should have used 99 balloons.

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pwnstigator
What I'm curious about is if there will be any fake-out attempts. How hard is
it to take a convincing picture of such a balloon in a cornfield (or even put
one there) and claim phony coordinates?

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rudyfink
That does not seem to be strictly foreclosed by the rules (
<http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/rules.aspx> ), but there is this nice catch
all clause which I suspect would come into play ("DARPA reserves the right to
disqualify a participant whose actions are deemed to violate the spirit of the
competition for any reason, including but not limited to, the violation of
laws or regulations in the course of participation."). I do note that
"[b]alloons will be in readily accessible locations, visible from nearby
roadways and accompanied by DARPA representatives." I suppose you'd want to
make sure to hard check the balloons and verify the representative part.

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markbnine
Our tax money at work. . .

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RevRal
It sounds to me like it could be valuable.

On the surface, we'll see how long it takes. I wouldn't be surprised if this
whole thing was done in a couple of days. And it will also cause a lot of
people to say: "wow, the power of the internet." It is probably a good way to
gauge the potential influence of social networking on the internet. Which _is_
a force that continues to grow, and we should do what we can to understand it.

I'm interested to see how it'll be accomplished. It might pinpoint the best
use of networking sites for promotion.

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mad44
I bet it will only take a day to solve this. Several groups are planning to
data mine using Twitter to solve the problem.

