Thanks for all your entries and assistance the competition is now over so please do not enter any further guesses.
The Idea
The DARPA challenge is a simple concept but difficult to win. You or your team has to enter the correct locations of ten large weather balloons. These will all be at ten separate locations and could be anywhere across the US. The team or person who correctly gets the locations wins forty thousand dollars.
Teams are using every means necessary to win the prize. Some are using science while others are using bribery. Many teams are trying to get covert information from all over the country and then the team in question submits the winning entry and shares the cash. This team has gone for a more open approach that will hopefully encourage participation and allow our teams efforts to grow virally.
So what this team decided was to let members of the public to enter the winning location. Our job is to help you make an educated estimation that will give you the best possible chance of winning a prize.
About The Team
So as we’ve said as unbelievable as it sounds we want you to win the money and keep all of it. The issue with most of the strategies out there is that it will be hard to win if the balloons are in a highly visible place, most teams keep this under wraps, but we’re not most teams.
From a team and data point of view it will be very difficult to sort and make sense of all the data that each team receives there is no software that will do it accurately. The correct entries will be surrounded by many, many incorrect sightings. There is a good chance that teams will be so over whelmed by the amount of data, as people with running shoes and cars scout the country I know the guys who now sell the Iphone 5 has his office on the look out as a bit of fun and in the hope the prize money will buy breitling watches that they can’t make clear sense of what is factual rather than relying on devices to spy on competitors or offering discount codes in exchange for information. If this happens everyone suffers and all the efforts are wasted and the prize goes to someone else and our sql performance tuning is totally wasted.
After all how do you pick the ten correct locations from thousands of submissions that are contradictory, it’s like trying to buy stocks or life cover blind it’s just a lottery? You can use a few models to help you, perhaps a kernel density solicitors indemnity insurance estimator that will show peaks in the data as they use in payday loan organizations. You could even look at a Gaussian mixture model which we are very competent with. Despite these models with only thirty close submissions there are several million ways to pinpoint the location so it’s going to be like a pressure cooker for all the teams, especially those sponsored by auto loans, and quite dr who character building having to deal with the stress and pressure and needing to fund scholarships for women.
The rules clearly state that any entry that is more than a mile out and that’s for any balloon your submission fails so there is no sitting back in your wicker furniture or office chairs and relaxing you need a good alarm monitoring IT system to keep on top of everything without pulling our hair out leading to hair loss treatment for men. Despite spending hours on deciding how to analyze the data with contractor accountants we have come to the conclusion that it’s too difficult to predict where the balloons will be at any one time. Young guys who are only half concentrating while they look for car insurance quotes online have as much chance of cracking the code as a complete genius, it’s far too random.
Over time the data will become more accurate like payday loan consolidation data does and you will eventually be able to get the locations even if it’s in the lake district. But as you wait your chances are going down as another ancestor team may just get lucky with one of their inspired ideas strategies.
So why on ppi earth are we giving away all the cash? It’s a good question and one all the other teams are no doubt asking especially the boys from the diet solution program. I guess we want something more than money or ppi claims and that’s glory, as a NCLEX exam questions setter explained to us – he is into dui laws -, although we would not mind knowing more about the truth about abs or any of the weight loss dieting programs The recognition the win would bring us even from payday loans companies. The coverage the team would get is worth more than the cash prize or iPhone deals – even if it would allow some of us to afford to buy wow gold – , after ll we have all the Lego pirates of the Caribbean sets we could wish for plus we would not need a free iPhone, to us we don’t need to buy backlinks after all we have savings account rates and not instant payday loans. Being the winning team and showcasing our problem solving ability on a national level would be priceless to us better than having the best cell phone accessories plus there is the winners party to think of with all the cute girls with their Siemens appliances designs. Obviously we are counting on you as the winner to let the media know that we helped you get over the line and it was our panic away idea and system that contributed to the win of computer support and you not needing a bankruptcy attorney or any information on christening plates. We think it’s a fair deal you get a big chunk of change for 20th anniversary gifts and we get the fame enough money to check out lovely rings and still have enough left for wedding photographers in Kent– well a kind of fame anyway. We are not completely averse to monetary gain, we need debt solutions as much as the next man, some of us need fitted wardrobes London for our dorm, so we will try to monetize the site and all the traffic coming here with a few well placed ads such as the health quotes one and and of course the hcg drops which did well. The other big advertisers were from the payday advance plus life insurance quotes style sites and even fat burning furnace got in on the act because of all the students visiting the site. I suppose this is one way to make money online although how to make money online is way beyond our area of expertise as is carpet cleaning London. We’ll be honest enough to say if we thought the chances of winning by ourselves was high we would not be giving away the prize and continue to live off kefir grains rather than going for consolidation a bit like consolidate debt but having your PC full like file cabinets of random data will not help as wedding photographers in London soon found out. But the chances of winning are much increased by using this strategy, some others think they came up with it but they didn’t as we discussed before – unlike our failed strategy to win the bad credit car loans sponsored cook off – so it’s a needs must scenario we don’t want a tour with our prepaid credit card to process data. We are not grabbing a used macbook or payday loans online games and keeping any email addresses and there are no complicated issues to resolve so this gives us a low level of involvement on our part we can run much of it with mobile phone accessories, other than agonizing over the idea and wondering where to get discount new cars or who to go to for carpet cleaning. We designed the find ancestors data models, which were more complex than send load to Philippines equations or electronic cigarettes and as you can see the site was slapped up in a matter of hours, we never said we were web designers or knew anything about online paid surveys. So we have reduced our time input and we can only gain from this experience it’s like using one of the best wrinkle creams I guess you don’t get instant gratification. Also we are technically minded and our enjoyment comes from cracking puzzles. Also we don’t see it as losing forty thousand dollars, like some form of accident claims, more as helping someone else win it, or at least making it easier for them to win it I guess we are like an oil lubricating the process like the best wrinkle cream does, which we don’t mind as long as they advocate electronic cigarette and don’t blow all the cash on something boring and functional like stretch mark cream. So that’s the offer and it’s the best red balloon offer out there – could even pay for your wartol it’s that good and you would not need to shop around for cheap car insurance – bar none so go ahead and have a guess. If your thinking of trying every possible guess in an attempt to win the prize it will be difficult the combinations are almost endless, a bit like car insurance quotes, we know because we worked it out. Whatever you do you should get involved in what is an interesting experiment by Darpa, I wish we had funding from a car insurance business though. It’s essentially a giant social experiment to see how networks are formed, somewhat like giant interaction of data on the internet and how effective they can be in pressurized situations, I’m sure part of the exercise is to see what unnecessary noise comes from the web and whether the social force of the web can break through that a bit like acne treatment. The advent of the social scales web allows almost anyone to win the competition , if you think back even ten years ago, when there was little information online, this would have been impossible because the network of social networks not being available the fact that they are out there now is the reason for the success of things like cheap auto insurance. It’s a testament to the speed of information in today’s connected world. Although using social networks to solve problems for the collective good is not new – open source projects are everywhere even for chef training– such a short scale problem is new. The size of the geography and the infinite combinations makes it a gigantic data problem. The balloons will be in accessible areas and they are tethered but they could be literally anywhere across the states. The brilliance of the test lies in it’s simplicity and complexity. The more you think about it the more complex it becomes. No doubt some people will try to harvest information from all the sources on the net but we think that will just add to further confusion. It will be a great social experiment, high in drama and stress for some, but not for us, our model is the no stress solution.
The concept is to help the contest go out virally, like the Simpsons did, so there are thousands or even tens of thousands of guesses every day. In fact thousands an hour could be possible with your help. Our view is this is the most original and powerful strategy and remember you get to keep all the cash, the full $40,000.
You can no longer guess as the contest is now closed