10 Red Balloons: DARPA Challenge Finds 10 Bright Red Objects Across US in 9 Hours Using Social Networking

DARPA, also known as the Department of Mad Scientists, issued a challenge that occurred on Saturday, the 40^th anniversary of the establishment of ARPANet, the proto-Internet. The plan: raise ten red, 8-foot weather balloons in well-trodden places and give a $40,000 prize to whatever entity submits the precise coordinates of all 10 balloons in the shortest time. MIT’s Red Balloon Challenge Team won the prize by incentivizing people to both look for the balloons and—this is very important—inviting other people in their social networks to also look for the balloons. Cash incentives for both finding the balloons and for inviting people who ultimately found the balloons no doubt helped the MIT team to complete the challenge in only 9 hours, which is sort of amazing considering the needle-in-a-haystack nature of the challenge.

Here’s where the balloons flew:

DARPA’s Red Balloon Network Challenge was solved in a manner similar to the old “all points bulletin” that law-enforcement agencies use to search for suspects or “persons” of interest. However, search resources can be vastly greater—virtually unlimited—using social-networking technology in this manner. The technology holds great promise for good (think of the US Department of Justice’s Amber Alert system for finding abducted children) or ill (think of George Orwell’s Big Brother government from the novel 1984).