The hunt is on (Image: DARPA)

Tomorrow morning, people across the US will start hunting for 10 weather balloons hidden across the country by the Pentagon’s research agency DARPA.

The treasure hunt is designed to test how well people can coordinate with one another online and will award $40,000 to the first person to enter the GPS coordinates of all 10 balloons, accurate to within a mile. The 2.5-metre-diameter tethered balloons will be flown only in daylight, and taken down for the night.

DARPA has run competitions in the past to encourage the development of new technology, for example the Urban Challenge for robotic cars. But the DARPA Network Challenge is instead about how people use existing technology to solve a task, says Norm Whitaker, a project director at DARPA.


“It’s not really the balloons we’re looking for; we’re looking for the techniques and the capabilities that the internet has made possible,” says Whitaker.

Happy birthday, internet

The challenge is both a celebration of the internet’s 40th birthday and a chance for the agency to learn more about how people can mobilise and react to changes in their environment, says Whitaker. “If we need to locate people or contact them fast, how would we do that?”

Whitaker points out that before the internet, civil authorities would have turned to TV news bulletins to get a message out about local floods, for example. But today, there are faster alternatives. “With Twitter or Facebook, we can reach out to people in a matter of seconds,” says Whitaker.

He expects people to use tools like these to try to win.

Find a friend

Some people taking part are willing to talk strategy. Karlan Mitchell, a dental technician and computer programmer located outside San Francisco, is writing software to search Twitter and Facebook for news of balloon locations. In a nod to the anniversary, he’s targeting updates originating from the vicinity of sites connected to the internet’s forerunner, Arpanet, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In addition, people can leave information about a balloon’s location on his site to gain a cut of any winnings.

Meanwhile if Randy Janinda, a computer security specialist located near Atlanta, Georgia, wins, he will give away all the prize money to those who helped.

The opportunity to study what people can do with their online networks is more interesting than the cash, he says. “We build up these social networks, collecting friends on Facebook, and thousands of Twitter followers, but how much influence does one person really have over another?” he asks.

False leads

Echoing a sentiment expressed by some of the contestants, Whitaker stresses that the challenges of cooperating online make finding the balloons more complex than it might first appear. Establishing trust and dealing with false information will be difficult, he says.

New York-based artist Larry Moss hopes to avoid trust problems by working with a network of fellow balloon artists he has cultivated online since 1991. Rather than children’s entertainers, though, they are “serious artists whose medium is balloons”, he says.

If the balloon artist team win DARPA’s prize, they plan to use their winnings to honour the internet’s birthday by building and flying a 9-metre-tall cupcake made of balloons. “You can’t have a birthday without cupcakes,” says Moss.