[cap-talk] DARPA Network Challenge

[Jed Donnelley]

Cap-talk,

I thought some of you might find this DARPA Network (weather balloon) 
Challenge of interest:

http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/

There is discussion of it in a variety of places, but I found this 
somewhat self serving review of team efforts to win it of interest:

http://cashforredballoons.com/


I somewhat doubt that it will be won - at least this first time around.

One technical aspect that I find interesting is that of providing 
assurance that people who submit data on sightings will actually be 
rewarded (e.g. vs. the site operators pocketing the "win"nings by 
saying that they or their friends actually submitted the sighting earlier).

If anybody has thoughts on how to solve that technical problem (not 
with trust, but with computation) I'd be interested to hear them.  In 
principle it seems to me that a site that would output signed data 
containing the sequence of sightings input would come pretty 
close.  It would seem a bit improbable that a sighting of the balloon 
that I saw would come in seconds before my sighting was submitted 
(the output of the other sighting coming back to me before my own 
sighting came back).

I know I'll be taking a look from our high rise office building on 
Dec 5th to see if I see any red weather balloons flying over San 
Francisco.  ;-)

I'm not sure yet if I'll report any such sightings.

If anybody else is planning to participate, I'd be interested to hear 
your thoughts.

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed-signature.html