<ul><li>In 2009, the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hid 10 giant red balloons across the US, offering $40,000 to whoever located them all.</li><li>The MIT group won the challenge by creating a multi-level marketing scheme for help finding the balloons, with monetary incentives for people who provided correct location coordinates and recruited others to join the search.</li><li>The competition aimed to explore the roles that the Internet and social networking play in solving broad-scope, time-critical problems, such as establishing trust in adversarial situations in social networks.</li></ul>

Pentagon once hid 10 giant red balloons across the US & offered $40,000

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