Passage IV

A Hunt for Red Balloons

In December 2009, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, known as DARPA, sponsored a high-tech scavenger hunt. For this challenge, ten eight-foot-wide, red, weather, balloons were delivered to nine states across the country tethered to the ground in a public place, and sent one hundred feet into the air. The winner would be the team to identify the latitude and longitude of all ten balloons first. By the end of the contest, many teams had competed for the prize.

DARPA had anticipated it would take nine days to track down the balloons, since the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did it in just under nine hours. Not even a week! Team leader, Riley Crane, explained that their plan was to build a system that encouraged collaboration, deliberately spread misinformation, and offered monetary incentives.

Using e-mail, instant messaging, texting, social networking, and phone calls, information was gathered and shared by the MIT team. Their winning strategy mobilized spotters who sometimes drove for hours to verify balloon locations. The team’s incentive plan paid balloon spotters $2,000; in addition, the team offered smaller amounts to people who found the people who had found a balloon.

The balloons were red, so easily spotted. When the picture of a balloon in Rhode Island spread through the Internet like a virus, spotters raced to Providence to verify the sighting. The ruse worked, but there was no red balloon in Rhode Island, only a computer-generated decoy.

According to Dr. Regina Dugan, DARPA’s director, the game had a serious purpose. To analyze the way technology can be used to share information in order to solve a problem too big for one person to solve alone. In a natural disaster, however, how quickly can the military locate twenty heavy equipment operators and dispatch them to a scene? That imagined scenario might not prove whether social networking have value beyond chatting with friends, but it does raise the question. DARPA’s balloon hunt may have answered it.