MIT team wins Darpa's treasure hunt in less than one day

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.

The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover the location of all 10 balloons, but the process detailed on the team website explains that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.

The team offered the first person to spot a balloon a $2,000 share of the prize money, but smaller awards would also be given to those who referred that player to MIT's website - a scheme of incentives aimed at getting people to urge their friends to take part.

Whatever happened in the end, it appeared to work - and quickly.

"The challenge has captured the imagination of people around the world, is rich with scientific intrigue and, we hope, is part of a growing 'renaissance of wonder' throughout the nation," said Dr Dugan.

In the end the eight-foot balloons were hidden in locations across nine states: Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.