Ten Red Balloons

An almost childlike hunt for ten red balloons sponsored by the Pentagon promises to revolutionize the way in which society searches for missing children or tracks down terrorists.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offered a $40,000 prize to the first person to locate ten big, red balloons raised on tethers across America on Saturday, from Portland, Oregon, to Miami, Florida. The goal was to test the use of word-of-mouth over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

In just under nine hours a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) claimed the prize. “There were some people who thought it would take five minutes and some others who thought it would not be solved,” Johanna Jones, a Darpa spokeswoman, said.

The MIT team devised a system that it calls “recursive incentives”, in which everyone involved in tracking down a balloon shared a cash prize. The $40,000 prize was divided into a total of $4,000 per balloon. The person who actually spotted the balloon received $2,000; the person who invited the finder into the network received $1,000; the person who invited the inviter got $500, and so on, with everyone along the successful chain receiving half the reward of the person below him. Any prize money left over was to go to charity.

The system differs from traditional rewards by offering payouts to those who introduce the ultimate tipster, as well as to the tipster himself.

“We can envisage deploying this system to find missing children or stopping terrorist attacks,” Riley Crane, a Society of Science fellow at MIT’s renowned Media Lab, said. For the Pentagon, the main thrust of the experiment was less to find missing people than to prepare for a mass mobilization.

“People ask about the search for Osama bin Laden, but that was really not the point of this particular effort,” Peter Lee, the director of the Darpa office that designed the project, said. “For us, there is not such a focus on finding people who are trying not to be found. There is also the question of when you need to mobilize a large force, such as when you need to find ten backhoe operators if there is the collapse of a building.”

The Pentagon said that the contest attracted widespread interest and that several teams had located eight of the ten balloons before MIT won after 8 hours and 57 minutes.

This is a pretty incredible example of communication and networking coming together in a non-traditional way to solve a problem. Who could have imagined that a combination of social networking and a pyramid-scheme payout would win a government sponsored contest?

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