

Darpa announces Network Challenge winner (MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team) - jeremyawon
https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx

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ryanwaggoner
Wow, that was fast. Anyone have any info on how they did it?

EDIT: From <http://balloon.mit.edu>, it looks like they just created a system
to assign personalized tracking links to which you could submit pics and
coordinates of balloons, as well as invite other people to get a personalized
tracking link of their own. If you found a balloon, you got $2000, plus your
inviter got $1000, plus their inviter got $500, etc, etc. Simple but obviously
effective.

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ct
It sounds almost like a MLM (Multi-level Marketing) scheme.

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SandB0x
Except with a convergent sum of money...

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cwan
What do you suppose the practical military applications for this is? (and
maybe a corollary is if this solution was worth 40K + whatever overhead was
required)

This is what the challenge says: "The Challenge explores basic research issues
such as mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking
constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of
applications."

That's pretty general, and we now know the solution - so does this have any
commercial applications?

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dschobel
It's a good solution to any 'spot the terrorist' type problem.

As for commercial applications, maybe marketing as it incentivizes spamming
your friends and family.

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catch23
I'm not so sure about that... seems like the way that the MIT team won was by
using an affiliate model. We'll pay you money if you find a balloon. Would
that work in a terrorist situation?

$2000 for the first terrorist found. Seems like you'd get lots of random
arrests in hopes of scoring the $2000.

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cwan
The way the MIT team managed "fraud" was that a picture was required. This
isn't like a spot the terrorist problem either though - but perhaps it also
provides insight into how to improve the effectiveness of rewards.

It's not like a terrorist is like a red balloon at clearly visible
intersections (as per the contest design in this case). But maybe rewards
should be designed such that they also incentivize the second order referral
network to encourage more people to care (in effect creating something of a
decentralized team) - perhaps encouraging a referral network to train others
to the task.

There are all sorts of problems though if the target is a terrorist though.
Recently the bigger problem seems to be home grown terrorists so it's not as
if they'd stick out. If the problem is applied to a place like Afghanistan in
hunting for insurgents, there could well be a number of disincentives to the
local population to reporting it (whether it be out of loyalty or fear) and
those disincentives might considerably greater than the incentives -
particularly to the referral network - a network I'd add would know your
loyalties in a rather dangerous place. Similar problems for finding a bomb or
anything that doesn't want to be found for that matter.

Maybe there will be a future challenge where the balloons are more hidden. It
also reminds me of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=955793>

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jazzychad
Completed less than 9 hours after balloon launch. Wow.

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johnl
Makes me wonder if this is still true (if it was true in the first place)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation>

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storborg
Was it the balloon.mit.edu team or the redballoonrace.com team? (Both involved
MIT people, and both used essentially the same strategy)

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jeremyawon
press release:
[http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnetworkchall...](http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnetworkchallenge.darpa.mil%2Fdarpanetworkchallengewinner2009.pdf)

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djb_hackernews
It will be interesting to see what their approach was. $1,000 finders fee for
each balloon? $4,000?

Greed is the only solution I can come up with.

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swolchok
Yeah, and your interest will be satisfied if you actually visit their website
and scroll down.

