Monica Hesse at the Washington Post reports that a team from MIT has won a DARPA prize for solving a distributed problem with a team/network that was partly ad hoc. TheDARPA Network Challengerequired teams to locate 10 weather balloons located around the country. From Hesse’s article, “Spy vs. spy on Facebook:”
In DARPA’s Network Challenge, tied to the 40-year anniversary of the Internet, the Department of Defense’s research arm placed 10 weather balloons in public places around the country. The first team to locate and submit the balloons’ correct geographic coordinates would get the cash prize. Ready, set, Twitter!
More than 4,000 teams participated. More than a few interesting things were revealed about the human psyche.
“It’s a huge game-theory simulation,” says Norman Whitaker of DARPA’s Transformational Convergence Technology Office. The only way to win the hunt was to find the location of every balloon, but a savvy participant would withhold his sighting until he’d amassed the other nine locations, or disseminated false information to throw others off the trail.
The winning team was spearheaded by Riley Crane, a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab. MIT’s team set up an elaborate information-gathering pyramid. Each balloon was allotted $4,000. The first person to spot one would be awarded $2,000, while the people who referred them to the team would get smaller amounts based on where they fell on the info chain. Any leftover money, after payment to spotters and their friends, will be donated to charity.
Crane says that the team’s decision to spread the wealth was instrumental to its success, as it gave people an incentive to share good information, and a feeling of investment in the process. He was less interested in the monetary prize than in the potential for social research.
More articles by Monica Hesse here.
See also
our earlier post, “How to Break Networks”
(about Lt. Col. John Graham, then of the West Point faculty)
NB: It’s not clear how the Washington Post is archiving this article – it bears the html alternate title MIT wins Defense Department balloon hunt, a test of social networking savvy. A minor example of the difficulties that come with technological change.