DARPA Network Challenge 2009

photos courtesy DARPA

The DARPA Network Challenge 2009 was held Saturday, December 5, 2009. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the organization that originally developed the Internet, held this event to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet.

By late on the day of the competition, there were over 4000 registered contestants. Congratulations to MIT for winning the contest.

We've added a section below on how we did.

Stratofox participation

Stratofox participated as a team in the Network Challenge. If you'd like to report finding a balloon, we'd appreciate any reports by e-mail to redballoon@stratofoxNOSPAM.org (or any method that gets the message to us) with the balloon number and coordinates. Thanks!

If we had won, we'd have treated this as a fund raiser for Stratofox, which is part of a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation.

We have a very talented crew at Stratofox. We recovered the first amateur rocket launched to space. We recovered 8 research balloons for Stanford University and the NASA Ames Research Center. More recently, we used the Internet to help the Mars Society locate a research balloon in Colorado, handicapped by having only 2 data points to project the landing site. But honestly, we have no idea how well anyone's talents and interests will fit the DARPA contest.

And not just for the DARPA contest, we're always recruiting more team members with useful skills who are interested in helping amateurs and entrepreneurs advance the pursuit of decreasing the cost of access to space. See "So you want to join Stratofox?" Our next event will be support of a suborbital space launch by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in the Spring.

We didn't require people to be members of Stratofox in order to participate in our effort on the DARPA Network Challenge. Rather, we expected the kinds of people we'd meet through this probably an excellent recruiting opportunity for us.

What is the DARPA Network Challenge?

10 red balloons were tethered at various locations around the contiguous "lower 48" states from 10AM Eastern Time (7AM Pacific) to 4PM local time. (The ones on the East Coast were up 6 hours and on the West Coast for 9 hours.) The object was to be the first to submit a correct list of each balloon's number (1-10) and its geographic coordinates.

The pace of the event was anticipated to depend a lot on where the balloons were placed. On average, there could be a 1 in 5 chance of a balloon in any given state. But we didn't know they'd divide things that way. Even presuming there would be one in California, the most populated state with 1/8 of the US population, it makes a big difference in visibility if they put it in Los Angeles (the biggest city in the state) or Cedarville (a high desert town in the most isolated northeastern corner of the state), for example. We just knew they'd be in publicly accessible places. We'd find out on the day.

It's a contest

On one side, it was a contest. There was a $40,000 prize for winning. Though many teams decided to donate the prize to a charity if they won. Otherwise it would be necessary to arrange to split that amount among the many necessary participants and risk leaving people out, not to mention the odd tax accounting consequences of receiving a relatively large amount and disbursing many relatively small amounts.

The Stratofox Aerospace Tracking Team is part of a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation, the South Bay Community Network, and would qualify as a charitable organization for anyone looking for a place to donate their winnings. It may or may not have been worthwhile to point that out to others. But that's what we were planning to do - if we had been so lucky as to win, we'd think of it as a fund-raiser for the organization.

Other teams grappled with the issue of how to motivate people to help them if they're not going to be part of splitting the prize.

[But in the end, money was a deciding factor. Some balloons were found by few people, who then only spoke directly with MIT. Oh well. That's what the experiment was about.]

It's a social networking experiment

The Network Challenge was also a social networking experiment. Even before it started, DARPA was clearly using the opportunity to study social networks in action and under pressure. The rules were set so there was vastly too much territory to search in too short a time. No one could do this alone or even in small groups. The Internet and unselfish reports by other participants would have to be part of the game.

But where things are open to the public, be prepared for mischief. We thought [correctly] that there was likely to be a lot of false reports to foul up groups trying to rely simply on the work of others. And it seemed DARPA, as a Department of Defense project, would have an interest to set up the dynamics of the event to simulate a "fog of war" scenario and see what happens.

Reporting found balloons

Each balloon needed to be reported with its geographic (GPS) coordinates and the number on the balloon.

Each balloon was tethered in a publicly accessible location. A DARPA employee was able to identify himself or herself.

Everyone was encouraged to, and did, use all their favorite social networks to spread the word.

As Hams are so used to saying... Good luck in the contest!

Coverage on social networks

People are talking about us. Thanks for the support!

• Follow on Twitter: @ikluft @vdalal
• See our event page on Facebook
• "Stratofox and the DARPA Network Challenge", The Launch Pad blog, X-Prize Foundation
• "Stratofox and the DARPA Network Challenge", Space Prizes blog (same as the X-Prize article on the author's own blog site)

How we did

At the time the contest ended with MIT being announced as the winner, DARPA revealed where the balloons were. The following is our self-evaluation of how we did.

• balloon sites we had correctly identified
  • Union Square, San Francisco, CA (#1)
    • http://twitpic.com/sacnb
  • Tonsler Park, Charlottesville, VA (#3)
    • Charlottesville Hook newspaper article
  • Chase Palm Park, Santa Barbara, CA (#4)
    • http://twitpic.com/sa0rx
  • Glasgow Park, Christiana, DE (#7)
    • http://tweetphoto.com/5891778
  • Waterfront Park, Portland, OR (#9)
    • http://twitpic.com/sack9
  • Chaparral Park, Scottsdale, AZ (balloon number not determined by us, turned out to be #2)
    • http://twitpic.com/s9ffv
• sites incorrectly identified, misinformation we fell for
  • Albany, NY (#8) - photo taken from Madison & Swan
    • http://twitpic.com/s9kun
  • Royal Oak, MI (balloon number not determined) - photo taken from 322 E 4th St
    • http://twitpic.com/s9gu6
• misinformation we produced which others fell for
  • Mountain View, CA
    • a red balloon reported by one of our own observers which turned out to say "New Homes" - we snapped a photo and modified the image into a fake DARPA sighting
    • http://twitpic.com/s9vhg
• correct sites we never identified (balloon numbers obviously not determined by us)
  • Lee Park, Memphis, TN (#5)
  • Collins Ave, Miami, FL (#6)
  • Katy Park, Katy, TX (#8)
  • Centennial Park, Atlanta, GA (#10)

A list of the remaining balloon's numbers can be found at Mike Walsh's blog. Thanks for crediting Stratofox for part of the data.

Strategy

We started with a strategy on some sites to check first thing in the morning. The purpose of the contest was to mark the 40th anniversary of the first four ARPANet nodes coming online (leading to today's Internet) on December 5, 1969. So it seemed to make sense to check at or near those first four nodes:

• Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Menlo Park, CA
• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)
• University of Utah (Salt Lake City)

Additional sites which were checked by team members first thing in the morning:

• Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
• NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA (historical location of major Internet routers)
• National Mall, Washington DC
• DARPA Headquarters, Arlington VA

Of these initial-guess sites checked in the morning, only Santa Barbara turned out correct.

From the start, our software "bots" were capturing and recording literally every Twitter message ("tweet") with the word "balloon", plus other sources. But automation can go only so far. Thousands of messages were manually reviewed, and sometimes researched and correlated, through the course of the contest.

As everyone in the contest expected (or quickly figured out), there were a lot of false reports flying around. In evaluating reports, it soon became a matter of rejecting just about everything that didn't have a photo. Though in hindsight that criteria ended up shutting out a few real sites. And we still fell for a couple modified photos, wasting time determining where the photo was taken when it didn't matter. In any case, it was fascinating to be able to match up Google Street Views to the places where these photos had just been taken. And we couldn't have identified most of the real sites we got without that kind of work.

How the Network Challenge helped Stratofox

It would have been nice to win $40K as a fund-raiser for Stratofox. But with 4000 entrants in the contest, it was indeed a challenge which no team could take for granted. Again, we congratulate MIT for winning.

Stratofox as an organization undoubtedly benefitted from the experience anyway. We got exposure to a large group of talented people who might not have heard of us. It should be a plus for recruiting new members for some time to come. Stratofox depends on maintaining a level of talent and trust to be invited to participate in high-altitude rocket and balloon launches on a recurring basis. As with any volunteer organization, recruiting must be a continual process to maintain a strong organization. But it's even more important for Stratofox because we have to be somewhat picky about useful skills. See "So you want to join Stratofox?" for more information.

Also, it's still a relatively recent thing being part of a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. Stratofox's parent organization, the South Bay Community Network, received the designation a year and a half ago. We needed to establish the precedent among ourselves that it's OK to pursue fund-raising activities.

Credits

Thanks to Layer42 Networks of Santa Clara, California for providing the conference room for Stratofox's "War Room".

Thanks to our volunteers! (each group listed in alphabetical order)

Silicon Valley "War Room" team: Vasu Dalal, Dave Goodin, Andrew Klofas, Ian Kluft

DC Area team leader: K Mark Caviezel

Southern California team leader: Denise Pouchet

Volunteer observers: Michael Aherne, Jennifer Niles Barr, Paul Breed, Michelle Cadieux, Mark Cohen, Daniel Curry, Chris Demille, Nate Dietrich, Elise Engelhardt, Ian M Garcia, Doug Graham, Don Hackler, Bernhard Hailer, Richard Hagen, Dan Halford, Donald J. Irving, Henry Jen, Nicole Jordan, Bryan Klofas, Brian Laing, Burton Lee, Eric Logan, Catherine Nichols, Pierce Nichols, Kim Passante, Arpan Patel, Ashish Patel, Bindu Patel, Birad Patel, Michael Polkinghorn, Alan Radecki, Bill Rainey, Troy Robbins, Brian Rudy, Eric Schwartz, Bhavini Shah, Biren Shah, Robin Snelson, Paul Sutchek, Peter Thoeny, Steve Wopschall

Thanks to everyone who posted real observations in public - you made every team's results possible.

Thanks even to everyone who posted false observations in public - you made it the challenge it was supposed to be.

Did we miss anyone? If you did anything to help and aren't listed here, let us know and we'll correct it!