Earlier this week DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, moored ten, 8 ft red, weather balloons in undisclosed locations across the United States.
The DARPA Network Challenge offered a prize of $40,000 to the person or group who first identified all the locations.
The MIT Group which won the challenge used a clever pyramid incentive scheme. Each balloon was worth $4000. The person to identify the location earned $2000. The person who invited that person to join the MIT group got $1000, the person who invited the person who invited the person who located the balloon got $500 and so forth (any money not distributed in this way was given to charity.)
The incentive scheme meant that contestants not only had an incentive to find balloons they had an incentive to find someone who could find balloons (or find someone who could find someone who could find balloons and so forth).
Incredibly, the MIT team located all ten balloons in just under 9 hours! The challenge may seem frivolous but in fact is a great example
of how prizes and network technologies can combine to collect and use
highly dispersed information–a problem of very general interest and relevance.
The counter-insurgency and law enforcement applications are obvious. Substitute “Osama bin Laden” or “James ‘Whitey’ Bulger’ for “Red Balloon” and you can solve a case in 7 hours (give or take).
So, maybe Osama Bin Laden is going to be classified as a balloon and we will be setting up a pyramid scheme in Pakistan to find him?
What they probably also need to do is flood Pakistan with cellphones to make the network work.
they should try this with neutrinos!
Mo makes a good point, I checked the MIT rules again and see that all payments were also conditional on the MIT team finding all 10 balloons first so in fact they were not risking 40k.
The Military Industrial Complex doesn’t want to find Osama. You’d have to be ignorant and naive to believe otherwise. You are truly a denialist if you can see the statements made over the years and still think we are desperately trying apprehnd Osama.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nb3fesK-4S4
The problem with finding Osama bin Laden with this is that your enemy would have the incentive to give you false information, depleting your resources in the search, and probably ambushing you.
Nice try though.
The balloons had no incentive to move or rehide themselves.
There is little to be learned about the hunt for Osama, but plenty to be learned about the hunt for plainly visible, stationary or slowly moving objects. Pilotless drones, for instance. I bet DoD is rethinking just how secure their fleet of them is, based on this experiment.
Seems any insurgent group with wide enough popular support could locate all of them in the air over their territory at any given time. They can be taken out from the ground with laser-guided weapons. Not too much of a stretch, given what seems to be available in the arms bazaar these days.
The entire purpose of this exercise is PR so DARPA can keep their budget stable in an era of flat or declining defense budgets. It has become a zero sum game and all the services and departments have to fend off each other for money. Operation and, especially, personnel costs are rising (as Dems and Repubs try to outdo each other with ever more generous benefits for veterans) – so even a stable overall budget means declining R&D and procurement spending. DARPA is fighting to protect their rice bowl.
There is little applicability to finding Osama himself, because Osama would represent one great big very well-hidden balloon rather than many little balloons. However, this would be highly applicable to taking out the “middle management” of al Qaeda or the Taliban (more needles, less haystack).
Something similar was used once upon a time to flush out Pablo Escobar: he personally was very well protected and supported, but his associates and entourage were not. The latter were gradually “neutralized”, starting from the lowest levels of the pyramid and working upwards, until the whole structure was undermined and Escobar himself was defenseless and on the run and finally killed. Evaluating the roaring success of the larger objective of actually ending the drug trade itself is of course an exercise for the reader.
Finding Obama would be like winning the lottery; finding dozens of smaller fish would be more like an Easter egg hunt. The incentives for participation are different, so the prize contests have to be set up differently. The security precautions taken by the targets are also different, amounting more to safety in numbers and crossing your fingers in the latter case rather than truly high security.
I accept your apology.
Wow, surprised Amway wasn’t all over that.
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