DARPA Network Challenge
DARPA Network Challenge Topic on Baduku.com
So Last night I saw on the Rachel Maddow show that there was going to be this thing called the DARPA Network Challenge today where DARPA will launch 10 Balloons through out the country and the first to correctly submit all 10 geolocations for the balloons will get $40,000. Supposedly there are teams already working on it may are schools and others are charities. This I thought was the perfect place to test out Baduku in a real world scenario. Since people are supposedly also sharing misinformation that make this all the more challenging. Hopefully Baduku will weed out the fakes using consensus since people aren’t going to verify the same fake location as often. Well, lets see how it works, We created a temporary invitation code for this event
Invitation Code: DARPA
use that to sign up for a Baduku account and go to the Darpa topic to start sharing your sightings and confirm others as well is open discussions about the contest.
http://www.baduku.com/topics/darpa-network-challenge-2009-10-red-balloon-hunt_1293
Also there has been a sighting at Irvine Spectrum so since that’s close to me, I’m going to check it out and get back to everyone in an hour after I’ve verified if it’s true or not.
For more information on the event in general check out:
https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx
and for the wiki for this specific network challenge with tools and comments check out:
http://redballoon.wikispaces.com/Groups
So as it turns out MIT won the challenge. Baduku was able to post 2 of the locations and I verified that the post by geocaching at Irvine Spectrum was fake. I think a huge part in not getting as many of the geo locations as I thought we would was because the game quickly became about hoarding rather than sharing but I guess it made more sense to most that would be more beneficial to have a place that would donate the winnings be the winner than any single individual. However, I think in the future when Baduku is more prevalent, games such as this will find a great home here.