DARPA will pay $40,000 to whoever (whichever team) first reports the locations of ten weather balloons to be inflated December 5, around the U.S. Here is the announcement: DARPA Network Challenge.
Noam Nisan has some thoughts on this at AGT, and points out that very quickly some people started to offer to share the prize among those who would notify them of individual balloon's locations, conditional on the team formed in this way winning. Here's a wiki for people to share market design ideas on how to form a winning team.
Note that this is an aggregation of information problem a little like a prediction market, even though it is for postdiction rather than prediction...
There are a variety of different ways to try to win this competition but I'm sure most of them leverage, in one way or another, having as many people as possible know about the competition. Everyone should help spread the word!
ReplyDeleteWe're trying to do that on Facebook and on our website:
http://www.redballoonrace.com
Check us out and shoot me an email! Tell me what you think!
-Tom
My Team, DeciNena, will win because we have the coolest name, we are offering to share some prize money with all the active participants, not just the balloon finders, and we are 100% CUPCAKE FREE.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, the winning team will employ a mixture of all of these strategies. I wonder if DARPA may even run the contest a second time next year, to see what has been learned and how things develop. There is a practical application for this grand experiment.
Join us: http://decinena.com/
We've got a strong team that's going to give all the money to charity (Red Cross). If you'd like to help, report your balloon sightings to
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ispyaredballoon.com/
or at facebook
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=201028633372