How big a fleet of drone aircraft would you need search the US in a couple hours? It'd be tens of thousands, but it might be doable for a few million bucks. I think you could fly pretty high and use large telephoto lenses and high-speed video cameras to see red dots while scanning quickly. That'd be a more interesting project than trying to enlist a lot of volunteer spotters with iPhone apps.
I'm thinking the best approach might be an intelligent system to scape from Twitter/Facebook and correlate location words with "What the heck is that big balloon"-type phrases...would be difficult, but such a system could be really useful for the next major disaster.
That certainly wouldn't be ethical (as it would cause havoc for the other contestants) and it would be ludicrous (as DARPA would obviously know that your balloons were fake).
Also, making the contest more hostile would arguably be very ethical given that DARPA are funding it. It would presumably provide a better research outcome if the winning method had to deal with bad actors.
It wouldn't be ludicrous, because it would force your competitors to deal with the problem of fake balloon, presumably increasing your chances of winning (assuming you have some method for determining what is a real balloon and what is a fake one)
There are a variety of different ways to try to win this competition but I'm sure most of them leverage, in one way or another, having as many people as possible know about the competition. Everyone should help spread the word!
We're trying to do that on Facebook and on our website:
Here's a good interview question: The required accuracy is 1 arc minute, which is approximately 1.86 kms. The area of the continental United States is approximately 8080464 sq. km.
How many entries do you need to submit to guarantee one will contain the correct answer?
Supplementary question for extra credit: Let the correct answer above be X. Suggest a solution for finding the earliest correct answer from 10X entries.
You can get an ITIN without being a citizen or resident of the US, it's just seldom necessary. The most common reason seems to be foreign nationals with American investments that are taxed by the IRS.
Not necessary. If you assume that people is going to spread the news in twitter (or blogs, facebook, etc.) when they find a balloon, the locations is not a restriction. You just need a smart enough engine to search and find those tweets. Now, the "smart engine technology" is the difficult task (and for sure what DARPA is looking for).
So, if it is known someone will pay $X per photo with embedded GPS coordinates taken from under the ballon, then aren't we talking about how close to $4,000 a central gatherer is willing to go?
For the former, start a group, and build awareness. Direct the money to a cause. Use the iphone app to post and get updates.
For twitter, post to and follow a hashtag. At least 50% of your human labor will need to be dedicated to filtering spam if the tag starts to trend.
Definitely search on either to get random people on board http://www.facebook.com/search/?init=srp&sfxp=&q=red...