The Pentagon once hid 10 giant red balloons across the US — and offered $40,000 to the first people to find them all
- The Pentagon's DARPA group once challenged people to find 10 giant red balloons across the US.
- The 2009 challenge involved using the internet and social media to request tips from people.
The Pentagon once hid 10 giant red balloons across the US, offering $40,000 to whoever located them all — and a group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won the 2009 competition in less than seven hours.
The competition was put on by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on December 5, 2009.
Popular Science reported at the time that the MIT group won by creating monetary incentives similar to a multi-level marketing scheme for help finding the balloons: $2000 per balloon to the first person with correct location coordinates, $1000 to whoever recruited the person, $500 to whoever recruited the recruiter, and $250 to the recruiter of the recruiter. The last $250 reportedly went to charity.
In an online post describing the event. DARPA said the Network Challenge was designed to mark the 40th anniversary of the invention of the internet. Participants sought information from people across the web, requesting tips and leads about where the eight-foot balloons were located.
Those locations included Union Square in San Francisco, Collins Avenue in Miami, Lee Park in Memphis, Tennessee, and Katy Park in Katy, Texas, Popular Science reported.
The competition "explored the roles that the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems," DARPA said.
For some participants, false tips were difficult to sift through. MIT Media Lab Postdoctoral Human Dynamics researcher Riley Crane, who led MIT's successful group, told Popular Science.
"It became clear early on that there were a lot of people submitting false information. That was definitely the biggest challenge," Crane told the magazine.
Peter Lee, the director of DARPA's Transformational Convergence Technology Office, told Popular Science that one of the goals was to see how teams navigated unverified information on online social networks.
"The general question was the establishment of trust in adversarial situations in social networks," he told the magazine.
Popular Science reported that some teams repeatedly guessed locations hoping that some coordinates would stick, while community sites like Fark relied on smaller groups of verified individuals to locate any suspected balloons.
Twitter also proved to be useful for the challenge, allowing quick and widespread conversation about the possible locations of the balloons, Popular Science reported. As the challenge went viral, more people wanted to be involved.
Part of that viral-ness, especially for MIT, might have been thanks to their recruitment strategy. The monetary incentive to invite others to be involved in the balloon hunt is reminiscent of a pyramid scheme business model.
But Crane told Popular Science that MIT's strategy focused more on creating a trusted team with goals of helping themselves, science, and charity.
"Your reward was directly based on whether you were responsible for getting us key information," Crane said. "It didn't matter if you were the first or millionth to sign up. What mattered was whether you found a balloon, or if you signed up someone who found a balloon."
DARPA said that MIT found all 10 balloons in less than seven hours.
In the last two weeks, the US has been dealing with issues surrounding a number of unknown flying objects.
It all started when a suspected Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. Since then, the US has shot down unknown floating objects over Lake Michigan and Alaska. Unidentified objects have also been seen in Canada and Latin America this month.