POTTSTOWN PA – In a battle Saturday (Dec. 5, 2009) over $40,000 in prize money, Pottstown resident Maureen Gallant and thousands of others squared off against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Sadly for Gallant and the accompanying horde, the MIT team left them empty-handed.

A Boston-based university known for its scientific prowess, MIT took only hours to claim victory and the cash award in a contest devised by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). During October, DARPA invited groups and individuals to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons that had been hidden at secret locations around the country.

The balloons that had thousands of people on the lookout.

The contest was intended as an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving, so the defense agency made just one demand: competitors had to rely on the ‘Net and social networks to discover the balloons’ hiding places.

DARPA expected the competition, which officially launched Saturday, to take nine days. It ended in less than one. Poor Mo – as Gallant is known to her friends and blog readers – never had a chance.

Gallant works for a Lower Pottsgrove chiropractor, lives in the Owen J. Roberts School District, and in her spare time writes “Pottstown’s Blog.” It’s a conversational website she uses to voice her opinions and those of her readers on hot topics of the day. In a Friday (Dec. 4) blog post titled “I’m a Darpa Hunter,” Gallant announced she had registered and would compete for the prize.

“(Ten) balloons shouldn’t be that hard to track across the U.S., should they?,” she rhetorically asked at the time.

Turns out, it wasn’t hard at all for the MIT team. The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported MIT “created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.” It paid for submitted tips that panned out, and also offered “a scheme of incentives aimed at getting people to urge their friends to take part,” The Guardian said.

The eight-foot balloons were found in nine states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

Gallant acknowledges she wasn’t as organized as MIT, which was helped in its attempt by Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. In the end, Mo said in a Monday (Dec. 7, 2009) follow-up blog post, “I didn’t even look.”

DARPA claimed it learned a thing or two that could come in handy in future threats faced by the United States. It can be proud, too, that it’s “baby” has matured so quickly. That would be the internet itself, which began 40 years ago as a secure means for military communications, called ARPAnet.

Photo from The Guardian

Sign up to get The Sanatoga Post delivered free daily by e-mail.
See our galleries for photos that appear in The Post. Got news for us? E-mail The Post.