Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency organized the Network Challenge in which almost 4,000 teams registered to complete the task to correctly identify the location of 10 red balloons distributed around the United States. The competition aimed to develop new ways to understand how information is disseminated through social networks within small amount of time, the study could further be used to help solve big problems through chain of social networking.

The Contest objective included exploring basic research issues like mobilization, collaboration, and trusts in diverse social networking constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications.

DARPA organized the completion to mark 40th anniversary of ARPANet, pre-cursor to todays internet.

Winners

A small team at the M.I.T. Media Laboratory Human Dynamics Group led by a physicist, Riley Crane, was the first to win the challenge by location all the balloons in just eight hours and 56 minutes.

Winning researchers were specialized in studying human interactions that emerge from computer networks. They called their methodology used to complete the task as “recursive incentive structure”.

To locate the balloons they set up a Web site asking people to join their team. They relied on visitors to the Web site to invite their friends. They also sent e-mail messages inviting people to participate and sent a small number of advertisements to mobile phones too.

The team tempted participants by announcing that they would distribute the prize money both to chains of individuals who referred people who had correct information on the balloons’ locations and to charities.

Dr. Cane followed the approach “rewards people who make real contributions”, to win the contest.

The team supporting their technique said that this could also be used for finding criminals and missing children and halting impending terrorist attacks, which if applied correctly would definitely churn out the benefit of the power of social networking.