Thu 3 Dec 2009
Well, the day of reckoning is almost upon us – Dec 5th, DARPA Network Challenge Day! I've previously blogged about this here, and make sure to take a look at the comments because there's some good stuff there.
Anyway, I was looking again at the rules recently, and noticed some things I didn't notice before. The prize is to the 1st team that submits the most correct balloon locations. The balloons will only be aloft during the daylight hours of Dec 5th, unless there are weather difficulties, in which case the balloons will go up on the 6th or later. It's unclear whether they'll delay all the balloons, or whether it means that depending on the weather there could be balloons up on different days in different parts of the country (more bad news for teams that are thinking of driving around looking!!!). But teams have until Dec. 14th to submit winning entries. And they've revised the accuracy of the location to be within 1 mile (huge!). To me, this suggests that DARPA thinks the challenge will be won algorithmically. I think they might be right.
On Dec. 5th, I'm guessing we'll hear about the locations of 3-6 of the balloons. There may be a team here or there that has some private information, but I suspect most of the locations will be known by all teams who are paying attention. (Of course, only one of them will be first to submit…) But then the real fun begins. Starting at nightfall, the balloons are gone, but we can still find them. How? Well, I don't know. How much media is uploaded to the cloud each day? How many pictures, videos, that might show a balloon in the background, even if the photographer never noticed it? Of course, that media would have to be geotagged. It's possible to infer the location of balloons after the fact with some accuracy, especially now that we only need to be right within 1 mile. After all, teams will have more than a week to look, and then even to go out to these locations and pace off distances if they choose.
So, what do you think? Is this how the challenge will be solved?
I think it is more about who wants it more. If you are some, say, School of Information (hypothetically speaking) and want the media attention of winning, you figure the attention is worth ~20k to you. Then you add 20k to 40k that you (hope) you win, and sink that much into a Google AdWord buy of "Did you just see a red balloon?"
Methinks it comes down to the $ spent to solve it. Either that, or AARP kicks everyone's ass.
Well, I'm prepared to eat crow if cash turns out to be the key to winning this thing, but I really doubt it. This is an opportunity for disruptive innovation, or at least that's what DARPA is hoping.
The team at MIT appears to have put a lot of time and effort into this dumb idea under the assumption that a pyramid scheme is the solution:
http://balloon.media.mit.edu/mit/payoff/
But if they win, or if some other team that's just trying to pay people wins, it won't be because they did anything smart with their incentive scheme. It'll probably just be because they happened to get there first.
Anyway, what I'm hoping is that this challenge is like the gateway drug, and they'll continue to escalate the challenges in this space.
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)
Hey Nathan,
Would you mind sharing how many people you end up getting on your team? If that's secret info., maybe let us know after the challenge is over?
Instead of trusting that a team will actually pull through for you, why not win the prize for yourself: http://www.openredballoon.com – the site is completely transparent and shows all balloon locations. The catch? You have to pick the winning combination of balloons! This is far easier than having to split the money, deal with taxes, etc. and is similar to what Judd was saying in his first post on the topic about forgetting the money. The team doesn't keep any of the money, the submitter does.