Up, up and away
No, it's not what you think... "Balloon Boy" has not come untethered from his wacko parents again. Rather the mad scientists over at the Pentagon have cooked up a fun balloon-related puzzle.
Teams of networkers of all walks and stripes across the
country are eagerly gearing up for sunrise on December 5 this year, when the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to host a contest that challenges
participants to locate the coordinates of ten 8-foot weather balloons moored in
locations across the continental United States. The challenge is timed to
celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet, which began in the Agency
as ARPANET, and the winning team will be awarded a cool $40,000 for their
efforts.
The contiguous United States, or as Sarah Palin might say,
"the lower 48" is an area comprised of well over three million square miles and
all manner of terrain, from the Florida everglades to the Rocky mountains.
Large swaths of this vast territory are either minimally inhabited or remain as
complete wilderness, frequented only by the occasional cattle herd put out to
graze or logging company extracting timber. Certainly, given these factors, and
the fact that teams are only given the feeble daylight hours of one winter's
day and recognizing the limitations of electric and broadband access, it seems
that DARPA has given the American networkers a labor of Herculean
implausibility.
However, DARPA officials are optimistic. The recent history
of network-projects or so-called ‘cloud computing' have demonstrated the
previously unprecedented ability for group collaboration to realize, such as
the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which allows
users to donate their personal computers' processing capacity to projects in
diverse research areas such as mathematics, medicine, astrophysics and
climatology.
As Dr. Regina Dugan puts
it, "The DARPA Network Challenge explores the
unprecedented ability of the Internet to bring people together to solve
tough problems." Presumably DARPA game-masters won't make it too tough for
competing teams, as part of the goal of the challenge from DARPA's perspective
will be to see self-organized and spontaneously networked problem-solving in
action. There are some possible snafus in the set-up however, ranging from
balloons becoming unmoored or purposefully popped by vandals to pranksters
setting up fake balloons or spreading flooding competing groups with false
coordinates.
Certainly, it will be interesting to see what strategies network
teams use to gather information, but those in it for the money or fame probably
shouldn't be holding their breath. Larry King's already done enough balloon stories for one year.