On December 4th I blogged that DARPA was holding a competition (On Dec. 5th) where you could win $40000 in prize money.

My Predictions:

My guess is the correct answer is submitted in less than 30 minutes, on behalf of some sort of tightly knit organization.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I wonder if anyone is planning on playing dirty and attaching a bunch of fake decoy balloons at various locations throughout the U.S. … If that is the case then maybe my prediction of 30 minutes isn’t realistic.

The Winner:

The Red Balloon Team of M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

I find it unsurprising that M.I.T. won, considering the people that go there are obviously very intelligent.

What I do find surprising though is the lack of information released by M.I.T. or DARPA about the details on the network that was established that led to the win.

There is a useless PDF that the DARPA site links to – HERE and all it says it it took “less than 9 hours”.

The FAQ of the M.I.T. Red Balloon Team offers some insight into the process, but still doesn’t give any details about how many people ended up signing up and how they eventually won.

Kind of anti-climatic considering I thought there would be a lot of fake balloons launched, and other random hi-jinx.  Well maybe there was, but who knows, because like I mentioned earlier there seems to be absoultely no information about the progression of the contest.

Here is the map from DARPA on where they placed the 10 Balloons.  I wonder what their problem was with the central U.S.?