DARPA celebrates my birthday!
In order to celebrate my birthday tomorrow DARPA is offering a $40,000 prize to the first person or group of people that can find 10 red balloons. DARPA, aka the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is not just looking for any ten red balloons, but ten specific red weather balloons they have positioned around the United States. They are calling it the DARPA Network Challenge to hide the real reason for the contest, because the “Arlen is so awesome we want to give away money to celebrate” was too obvious.
10 99 Luftballons
The contest begins at 10 AM Eastern, and ends when a group provides the latitude and longitude of all ten balloons, or December 14th, whichever comes first. You can find the Frequently Asked Questions here.
So there you go, 10 AM tomorrow go win $40,000 for my birthday.
Find the location of these 10. I doubt they will be this close together.
OK, so it isn’t really for my birthday, but to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the internet. More specifically the ARAPANET, the internet’s predecessor.
To mark the 40th Anniversary of the Internet, DARPA is hosting the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.
Still, it is a good reason to use lots of things DARPA has helped develop: GPS, the internet, maybe some robot minions, or even a Predator if you have one to help with the search, which would be way cooler than the social networks other groups are using.
