Latitude

Innovation Research via Real-World Problem-Solving

To commemorate the Internet’s 40th anniversary, DARPA, the central research and development organization for the US Department of Defense, organized a network challenge in the spirit of serious games to study understand teams’ innovative use of social networking (and the spread of information within these networks), as well as the team-defined incentivisation schemes (monetary or otherwise) implemented to encourage network participation–in an actual problem-solving scenario.

The DARPA Network Challenge [is] a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads.

MIT Wins in Record Little Time

The challenge began on Saturday, December 5th, and would end when the first participants correctly submitted the location of all 10 balloons). A team from MIT was proclaimed winner fewer than 9 hours after the start of the competition. (The team members were Professor Sandy Pentland, Manuel Cebrian, Anmol Madan, Galen Pickard, Riley Crane, Wei Pan; the final standings for all teams are available here).

MIT would clearly have a vast network to draw from–and, apparently, had been recruiting spotters for some time. They leveraged Twitter and Facebook for viral reporting of balloon sightings, but the difficulty came in “separating the good reports from bogus ones.” (ref: John Dodge’s coverage).

To this task, MIT obscurely replied (pre-challenge): “We will use sophisticated algorithms from the field of network science and complex systems theories along with machine learning algorithms to identify valid submissions.”

MIT’s Network Incentivisation Scheme

DARPA announced that they would award $40,000 to the winning team.

Using click-through tracking for personalized invite links (ex. http://balloon.media.mit.edu/latituderesearch), MIT devised that they’d give $2000 to each person who found a balloon, $1000 to the person who invited them, $500 to the person who invited that person, and $250 to the person who invited that person. (MIT donated the rest of the prize money–a minimum of $12,500 in this scenario–to charity.)

(Note that the graphic above doesn’t account for balloon findings that took fewer than 3–the maximum–network “iterations.” More importantly, it doesn’t depict the far-reaching effects of each individual who did not receive money in the end (“dead ends”), as a central node in his own network while the search was ongoing–i.e. individuals who received $0, and invited people who received $0, still took part in the balloon search to potential relevance.)

This is a particularly compelling monetary structure because one perceives his chances of receiving some prize money as exponentially increased with relation to the number of people he himself activates–and one’s chances are substantially increased, given how removed the each successful searcher can be from oneself. (i.e. I only need invite “Friend A”–who may then invite her “Friend B” who may then invite his Friend “C” who may find the balloon–to receive an award). Thus, the benefit of engaging more people is, well–that much more beneficial to me.

Motivation is such a fickle (and powerful thing). I’m curious what other schemes–from a psychological or engagement standpoint–might’ve occurred to others for use in this scenario. Any thoughts?

Header image courtesy of hajime7′s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved; image in network graphic courtesy of hector-lazo’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.