MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/05/darpa.balloon.challenge/index.html

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(CNN) — A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology won $40,000 in a high-tech scavenger hunt on Saturday by discovering the location of 10 red weather balloons.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced that the MIT team was the first group in the contest to report the latitude and longitude coordinates of all 10 balloons, which were scattered across the United States.

DARPA is the U.S. military’s research arm. Saturday’s challenge is the latest in a series that the agency has hosted since 2004.

This contest was designed to test the way social networking and lesser-known Web-based techniques can help accomplish a large-scale, time-critical task.

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