The challenge posed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked people to find the coordinates of 10 red weather balloons floating above the U.S. in one day. Since no one individual could plot the location of all 10, participants had to figure out how to work with others to solve the puzzle. Team MIT's strategy was to build a Web site designed to attract more and more followers--people who might know the balloons' locations themselves and those could bring aboard others who knew the coordinates, essentially creating a chain effect. The five-member MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team consisted of group leader Crane and Manuel Cebrian, both post-doctoral research fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rounding off the team were three students--Galen Pickard, Wei Pan, and Anmol Madan.
MIT's Riley Crane only found out about DARPA's red balloon challenge a few days before it started. Yet his team went on to win the contest through its savvy use of the Internet.
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