Wow, that was fast. Anyone have any info on how they did it?
EDIT: From http://balloon.mit.edu, it looks like they just created a system to assign personalized tracking links to which you could submit pics and coordinates of balloons, as well as invite other people to get a personalized tracking link of their own. If you found a balloon, you got $2000, plus your inviter got $1000, plus their inviter got $500, etc, etc. Simple but obviously effective.
What do you suppose the practical military applications for this is? (and maybe a corollary is if this solution was worth 40K + whatever overhead was required)
This is what the challenge says: "The Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications."
That's pretty general, and we now know the solution - so does this have any commercial applications?
I'm not so sure about that... seems like the way that the MIT team won was by using an affiliate model. We'll pay you money if you find a balloon. Would that work in a terrorist situation?
$2000 for the first terrorist found. Seems like you'd get lots of random arrests in hopes of scoring the $2000.
The way the MIT team managed "fraud" was that a picture was required. This isn't like a spot the terrorist problem either though - but perhaps it also provides insight into how to improve the effectiveness of rewards.
It's not like a terrorist is like a red balloon at clearly visible intersections (as per the contest design in this case). But maybe rewards should be designed such that they also incentivize the second order referral network to encourage more people to care (in effect creating something of a decentralized team) - perhaps encouraging a referral network to train others to the task.
There are all sorts of problems though if the target is a terrorist though. Recently the bigger problem seems to be home grown terrorists so it's not as if they'd stick out. If the problem is applied to a place like Afghanistan in hunting for insurgents, there could well be a number of disincentives to the local population to reporting it (whether it be out of loyalty or fear) and those disincentives might considerably greater than the incentives - particularly to the referral network - a network I'd add would know your loyalties in a rather dangerous place. Similar problems for finding a bomb or anything that doesn't want to be found for that matter.
EDIT: From http://balloon.mit.edu, it looks like they just created a system to assign personalized tracking links to which you could submit pics and coordinates of balloons, as well as invite other people to get a personalized tracking link of their own. If you found a balloon, you got $2000, plus your inviter got $1000, plus their inviter got $500, etc, etc. Simple but obviously effective.