Just a quick thought on the Darpa social networking challenge which took place on Saturday (a puzzle set by the US gov’t with a $40k prize) and was won by an MIT team in under nine hours, well short of the nine day time limit. The task was to discover the location of 10 large red weather balloons which had been released into the lower atmosphere across the US.
Competitors were asked to find the location of the balloons using the internet and social networking tools by Darpa, the Pentagon’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, because they wanted to learn more about how such tools could aid ‘problem solving’.
Now call me slightly sceptical, but what I suspect has happened is that MIT has unwittingly carried out rather a valuable service for the Pentagon, for the paltry sum of $40k, which surely would have been ten times higher had the Pentagon decided to obtain the info through hiring a researcher like MIT. Instead since it was offered as a prize they got away with only paying $40k.
Whatsmore I’d love to learn more about the defence potential of social networking as Darpa sees it – but I guess that is something we can only guess about at this stage with no official details being published by the Pentagon apart from the opaque ‘problem solving’ rationale. Hmmm…. I won’t speculate endlessly on this but will leave it here by saying simply that I hope MIT haven’t unwittingly assisted in developing the military application of social networking in some way…
Dejan Levi