DARPA Red Balloon

Worked with DARPA at one point, but not this effort.

Challenge is interesting but it seems somewhat ill defined. 

Bursting a Few Balloons Regarding the Famous DARPA Red Balloon Challenge  By Stuart Madnick

Communications of the ACM, March 2022, Vol. 65 No. 3, Pages 33-34  10.1145/3517127

It is approximately 50 years since the first appearance of the ARPAnet, the predecessor to the now ubiquitous Internet. It is timely to reflect back on the DARPA Network Challenge (also known as the Red Balloon Challenge) in 2009 in honor of the 40th anniversary of the first remote log-in to the ARPANet on October 29, 1969. The results of that competition were reported in Communications2 but some important details have not previously been reported.

Teams had to find 10 red weather balloons deployed at undisclosed locations across the continental U.S. The first team to correctly identify the locations of all 10 would win a $40,000 prize. It was intended to explore how the Internet and social networking could be used to solve a distributed, time-critical, geo-location problem.

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) won in the surprisingly short time of less than nine hours. Much was learned regarding the value of social media, crowdsourcing, and incentive schemes. At the time, social media was rather new and these were valuable lessons learned.

But, there were several aspects of the event that did not get much, if any, attention. Much had been highlighted about the importance of the hierarchical incentive scheme used by the MIT team1 and how that helped them assemble such a large and geographically diverse team—leading to their success. That is, each member who joined the MIT team was encouraged to recruit additional members who would then recruit further additional members, and so forth. The reward for finding a red balloon not only went to the person who found it, but also to the chain of people who recruited the finder.a Thus, creating a strong incentive to grow as large a network as possible. In fact, it allowed even people living outside the U.S. to participate. Although they would not be able to personally locate a balloon, they could sign up friends and family in the U.S. to do the searching and gain some reward. In essence, the event was a form of a global pyramid scheme.

That is all quite exciting, but the reality may be somewhat different. In talking with people who were part of the DARPA group running the event and those who were part of the MIT team, it seems that instead of "People finding the balloons," it was much about the balloons finding the people.

Balloons Finding the People

It was reported in Tang et al.2,b that "DARPA selected readily accessible public sites where the balloons would be visible from nearby roads, each staffed by a DARPA agent who would issue a certificate validating each balloon location."

The consequences of this was not reported. It should not be surprising that often someone, totally unaware of the DARPA challenge, would be walking in these public places and see a big red balloon tethered to the ground. They might ask the attendant (the DARPA agent): "What was going on?" It is not clear how much would be explained, but the attendant would hand out a certificate with information including the precise coordinates of the balloon—note that not everyone carried around GPS systems in 2009 (the accompanying image depicts a certificate).

That person could then use the Internet to learn about the challenge, typically search around and find that the MIT team was still recruiting and sharing the rewards.c They could then rapidly join the MIT team and report their find to DARPA—and become part of the winners, since finding just one balloon provided no reward, you had to be part of a team that found all 10. ....... "