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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DARPA Network Challenge | 3/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T12:44:48.672218+00:00 | kb-cron |
== Other strategies == Prior to the competition numerous people had discussed possible strategies, including satellite photography, aerial photography and crowdsourcing to detect balloons, as well as the possibility of misinformation campaigns to stop other teams from winning. In the actual competition, there was a variety of strategies employed by teams. One team leader, Jason Brindel of San Rafael, California, organized a team of around 140 people. His plan was to create a web site and Twitter account dedicated to the challenge that would allow his team members to communicate their findings. Anyone participating in the challenge would be allowed to submit information, provided that they included details confirming about their submission. Brindel planned to have the team scour the Internet for mentions of balloons across news sites, blogs, and social media sites. George Hotz, a Twitter celebrity now famous for hacking the PlayStation 3 and settling a suit by Sony, only prepared for the competition for an hour before posting a tweet an hour before the start of the competition. Hotz was able to locate 8 balloons successfully. Four were found within his Twitter network of almost 50,000 followers, and four were acquired through trades of information with other teams. The fifth-place finisher, the Groundspeak Geocachers, deployed active geocachers and Groundspeak employees to search for balloons. They were successful in finding eight balloons, but due to a data entry error, were only credited with seven. A team calling themselves Nerdfighters utilized their existing network of followers from the Brotherhood 2.0 vlog to launch a viral video before the competition. They managed to attract 2,000 active balloon seekers. They also utilized 3,000 Nerdfighters who scanned for Internet traffic related to the competition and specialized in launching a misinformation campaign, hoping to confuse or misdirect other teams. They also created a network of cell phone users to provide direct text message verification of findings. A team of iPhone application developers formed Army of Eyes, based out of Austin, TX. Their application was developed soon after the original challenge announcement in order to be made available by challenge launch day. The iNeighbors team, made up of members of an existing social media site for neighborhood watch communities, performed no recruitment or trading efforts. Their goal was to evaluate the ability of their network to effectively report on abnormal activity within neighborhoods. They were able to successfully locate five of the ten balloons.
== Reflections ==
The challenge generated a number of insights.
First, it showed how mass and social media can act complementarily. While mass media were useful primarily for spreading general information about the challenge, social media were effective for viral dissemination of information about the challenge to potential team recruits.
Second, it showed how social media can be useful as a data mining source. For example, the iSchools team did better than many other teams by simply monitoring public websites.
Third, the challenge showed the variety of ways in which social networking can be utilized. The MIT and GTRI teams used them primarily to facilitate fast communication between participants, while the iSchools team used it as a source of information.
Fourth, the challenge showed the general effectiveness of using crowdsourcing techniques to solve geographically-distributed, time-sensitive problems. The DARPA program managers were surprised by how quickly the challenge was completed. However, it can be difficult to filter useful data from public sites, and the independent verification of publicly listed information remains a challenge in efficiency and accuracy.
DARPA noted that though social networks can be a powerful source of intelligence, using them may be politically sensitive due to the privacy concerns involved with data mining user content. Similarly, the winning MIT team surmised that their recursive approach would only be effective if the effort's goal was seen to be moral and good by its participants.
== Verified balloon locations ==
The officially verified coordinates of the balloons, listed by their tag numbers, were:
Balloon 1: Union Square, San Francisco, California 37°47′16″N 122°24′26″W Balloon 2: Chaparral Park, Scottsdale, Arizona 33°30′36″N 111°54′29″W Balloon 3: Tonsler Park, Charlottesville, Virginia 38°1′34″N 78°29′28″W Balloon 4: Chase Palm Park, Santa Barbara, California 34°24′51″N 119°41′5″W Balloon 5: Tom Lee Park, Memphis, Tennessee 35°8′17″N 90°3′43″W Balloon 6: Collins Avenue, Miami, Florida 25°54′14″N 80°7′31″W Balloon 7: Glasgow Park, Christiana, Delaware 39°36′30″N 75°43′51″W Balloon 8: Katy Park, Katy, Texas 29°48′56″N 95°48′15″W Balloon 9: Waterfront Park, Portland, Oregon 45°30′44″N 122°40′28″W Balloon 10: Centennial Park, Atlanta, Georgia 33°45′33″N 84°23′33″W
== Related challenges == Inspired by the success of the DARPA Network Challenge, DARPA launched the Shredder Challenge in 2011. This competition aimed to explore methods to reconstruct documents shredded by a variety of paper shredding techniques. As with the DARPA Network Challenge, some teams used crowdsourcing to solicit human help in reconstructing the documents. The winning team used a computer-vision algorithm to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification. On July 2, 2011, also inspired by the DARPA Network Challenge, the Langley Knights Challenge was launched. It differed in that there were knights to find in various locations in England and that had been placed on Google Maps so people in locations outside the UK could participate. In January 2012, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine launched the MyHeartMap Challenge to map Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) in the city of Philadelphia. According to the organizer Dr. Raina Merchant, "DARPA succeeded with locating red balloons. AEDs are a natural extension of a brilliant idea." Also inspired by the DARPA Network Challenge, a contest called Tag Challenge was sponsored by the United States Department of State and the Institute of International Education. Tag Challenge sought to have teams locate and obtain pictures of five individuals in five different cities across North America and Europe within twelve hours on March 31, 2012. Despite the fact that the potential winnings were considerably lower than for the DARPA Network Challenge, organizers sought to test the ability of the methods discovered in that challenge to "find a person of interest" rather than a statically located object.
== See also == List of computer science awards DARPA Prize Competitions
== References ==
== External links == Madnick, Stuart (March 2022). "Bursting a Few Balloons Regarding the Famous DARPA Red Balloon Challenge". Communications of the ACM. Vol. 65, no. 3. pp. 33–34. doi:10.1145/3517127. Archived from the original on 23 February 2022. Retrieved 16 December 2022.