MIT team pays cash for balloon coordinates to win DARPA Network Challenge

MIT’s entry has won the DARPA Network Challenge, which had teams using the Internet to find 10 red balloons placed around the country, from Portland Ore., to Katy, Texas, to Christiana, Del.

The MIT team cleverly outsourced the search to … everyone, more or less, in a convoluted pyramid scheme that paid cash to the finder of a balloon, the person that invited the finder to the competition, the person that invited that person and a charity.

Researchers on the team used the scheme to learn about how social networks spread information.

Posted by Brendan Lynch

Tags: DARPA, DARPA Network Challenge, MIT

This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Defense, Education & Training, Internet, Massachusetts, Networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.