Game over! After 8 hours 56 minutes, a team led by a MIT post-doctoral researcher of the school’s MediaLab,   Riley Crane, solved the contest, entered by more than 4,000 teams. See the story featured in the Washington Post here.

Date: Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009; registration: now open; Prize: $40,000.00

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition to explore the role of the Internet and social networking in supporting timely communication, wide-area team-building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of 10 moored, 8-foot, red, weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads. Participants must register on the competition website, and should check there for full details and rules.

The balloons will only be visible during daylight hours on Saturday, December 5. Teams will have approximately 9 days, until 12:00 PM (ET) on December 14, 2009, to collect the locations of any balloons they didn’t spot, and submit their entries.

Filed under: K-12 Outreach Programs

Tags: Competitions for Students, Internet, Social-networking