DARPA Networking challenge & how MIT team cracked it?

How many of you followed the DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) network challenge that happened less than a week back? Yeah, the red balloons contest!!

For those of you have not heard, see this - https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx

Here below is the official challenge description – But to sum it up in 2 sentences - they'll fly ten red 8-foot diameter moored weather balloons in various locations in US; the first person to register the locations of all ten will win $40,000. (Click on the image below for better resolution)

Now, it's obviously a problem in game theory, behavioral economics, and group collaboration. Contestants will register as individuals, not as organizations – and of course, people will collude and collaborate, but they'll have to determine not only mechanisms for taking in, validating, filtering, and crediting distributed reports (basic crowd-sourcing problems), but they'll also have to figure out the basis for distributing the prize.

It is interesting to note how MIT Red Balloon Challenge team won this competition this year (on Dec5th, 2009) in just hours after it started!! (The maximum allowed time was 9 days).

Team MIT took help from lot of people (strangers) across the nation in locating all the 10 balloons in such a record time through a viral campaign. But, how did they convince so many strangers to collude with them when the end result could be a cash prize?

Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed to attract more and more followers--people who might know the balloons' locations themselves and those could bring aboard others who knew the coordinates, essentially creating a chain effect.

The secret of success is in the payoff structure they came up with. That encouraged people to enthusiastically enroll as MIT’s colluders (is that even a word?) and also encouraged them refer many their friends & so on. Check how the payoffs are structured in below:

Source: http://balloon.mit.edu/mit/payoff/

Take away from this experiment and results? In the own words of Riley Crane, MIT Red balloon challenge team’s lead:

“And if I could add, from our point of view, what the message of this was. I think it's important to point out that there's a tremendous scientific opportunity in all of this, and from our side, we were never in it for the 10 balloons. Of course, that was the challenge, and that was exciting. But from a broader scientific perspective, we were in it to understand how to mobilize the vast resources of the human network, to face challenges and explore opportunities in living in such a connected society. And as a footnote to that, I think some of the applications that might come out of this would be: Can we use this technology we've developed to find missing children or something along those lines where there's an incentive for people to really participate and help out? Often, the police will offer a reward for finding a missing child. Can we restructure that in a way that we tap the vast resources of this network? Again,

maybe you don't live in the state where a child was abducted, but maybe you know someone who does. Or during an emergency, maybe we need to find 10 people in a region who can operate heavy machinery, maybe a building collapsed. And how can we use these new tools to solve those challenges to help society? That's kind of the broader message that comes out of this from our side.”