Wow, that was fast. Anyone have any info on how they did it?<p>EDIT: From <a href="http://balloon.mit.edu" rel="nofollow">http://balloon.mit.edu</a>, it looks like they just created a system to assign personalized tracking links to which you could submit pics and coordinates of balloons, as well as invite other people to get a personalized tracking link of their own. If you found a balloon, you got $2000, plus your inviter got $1000, plus their inviter got $500, etc, etc. Simple but obviously effective.
What do you suppose the practical military applications for this is? (and maybe a corollary is if this solution was worth 40K + whatever overhead was required)<p>This is what the challenge says: "The Challenge explores basic research issues such as mobilization, collaboration, and trust in diverse social networking constructs and could serve to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of applications."<p>That's pretty general, and we now know the solution - so does this have any commercial applications?
Makes me wonder if this is still true (if it was true in the first place)<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation</a>