A $40,000 online challenge proposed by the US government has been won by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - just hours after it was launched.
The Darpa Network Challenge, which took place on Saturday, offered a cash prize for the first group to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the US.
Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa - the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency - said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving.
More than 4,000 groups eventually registered to take part, but although the organisers had given players up to nine days to track the balloons down, the team from MIT scooped victory within nine hours of the launch.
"Darpa salutes the MIT team for successfully completing this complex task less than nine hours after the balloon launch," said Regina Dugan, the director of the agency. READ MORE
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