DARPA is one of the most innovative government funding agencies around. Back in the late 19060’s – when they were still called ARPA – they backed ARPANET, which ultimately became the internet that we know.

More recently, DARPA sponsored the Red Balloon Challenge. This involved discovering the location of ten large (weather-scale) red balloons, scattered across the country. Maybe they were expecting satellite imagery, or powerful telescopes, or image recognition coupled to location information on Facebook photos. But what actually won the prize was a variant of good old-fashioned chain letters. A group at MIT led by my friend Manuel Cebrian devised a brilliant scheme where participants were incentivized to recruit team members by a recursive prize structure. They quickly built the largest team in the competition – and largest set of human eyes – and in only 8 hours won the prize.

DARPA is now at it again with the Shredder-Challenge, which is to reconstruct documents that have been shredded into small pieces. This is like a puzzle where all the pieces have random shapes. And Manuel is at it again, this time from his new home at UCSD. This time they are coupling the recursive prize with a computer vision algorithm that assists players in putting pieces together. Check it out!