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3 December 2011 | NewScientist | 27 For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology downsides, however. “One of the weaknesses of our approach is that you can see what we are doing and disrupt it,” says Cebrian. Soon after entering the top five on the leaderboard, the UCSD team came under attack from at least five people who interfered by moving pieces around or locking incorrect ones in place. The team has had to roll back to before the attack and implement a levelling system, which determines how often someone can move a puzzle piece based on their previous success. The UCSD team is now in fourth place, but racing ahead is a competitor dubbed “All Your Shreds Are Belong To U.S”, the only ones to partially solve the fifth puzzle. The team could be a small group of hardcore puzzle-lovers, “manual solvers that worked all five puzzles in parallel”, says Landrum, but an email to Cebrian from “ucsdsaboteur” hints otherwise. The saboteur admits to recruiting others on 4chan, the favoured forum of Anonymous, to help disrupt the UCSD team, because “crowd sourcing is basically cheating”. The email signs off with the line “may all your shreds belong to us”. The saboteur has a point, as DARPA would likely prefer a fully automated solution. “If we lose to manual brute force, that’s really sad for science,” says Cebrian. He believes that a semi-automated solution could have applications to other combinatorial problems, such as protein folding, genome assembly or building 3D models of the brain. “The brain could be the largest puzzle ever solved, and humans could help put it together,” he says. Another application that might interest DARPA is sifting through a WikiLeaks-style data release. “Say there was a series of events that lead to some diplomatic situation. It is not easy to trace the origin and the causal path of this situation unless we have a way to put the pieces in the right place,” says Cebrian. In this case, individual documents become the puzzle pieces and the challenge is stitching them together into a readable narrative. These problems will have to wait until the challenge finishes on 4 December, and the contestants are under no illusion of what’s ahead. “This is probably the hardest computational problem I’ve ever met in my life,” says Cebrian. n A 2009 DARPA competition had teams trying to find 10 red weather balloons floating somewhere in the US – a feat that Manuel Cebrian’s team at the University of California, San Diego, managed in less than 9 hours thanks to crowdsourcing. His approach worked because anyone who submitted a correct set of coordinates was awarded $2000 of the $40,000 prize. The person who invited the balloon-spotter to join received $1000, with the awards continuing down the network. Cebrian is applying these incentives to the puzzle challenge (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1205869). The Playstation 3 hacker George Hotz, who has 35,000 Twitter followers, was able to achieve a spike of interest and find eight balloons, but Cebrian’s team beat him by sustaining a lower level of interest over a longer period. How to let a train catch you Do you struggle to reach the platform in time for your train? Then how about a “platform” which comes through your street before catching up with a non-stop high-speed locomotive? That’s the intriguing idea behind Moving Platforms, a transport concept dreamed up by London-based design company Priestmangoode. You would board a tram on your street, which would take you to your desired train and speed up while the train slowed down, allowing the two to dock for the same time a train would normally spend sitting in a station. “Coding is the new Latin. We need to give kids a proper understanding of computers if they’re to compete” Alex Hope, co-author of an education and videogames report to which tech firms gave their backing this week. Hands-on with PlayStation Vita The PlayStation Vita launches this month in Japan and worldwide in February. Sony’s successor to its handheld PlayStation Portable console, the Vita boasts a 13-centimetre touchscreen. Sensors and a compass give a full range of motion controls, while GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth keep you located and connected. Vita’s PS3-style graphics wouldn’t look out of place on your HDTV but will people pay $299 for a portable console now that smartphone games are so cheap? Siri goes wild Now you can heat your home just by asking your cellphone. Siri, the new voice-controlled digital assistant installed on the iPhone 4S, has been hacked by Pete Lamonica, a software developer in St Louis, Missouri, to let him create custom commands. Lamonica hooked up Siri to his wirelessly controlled thermostat, letting him ask for a temperature reading or set a new level. ONE PER CENT PRIESTMANGOODE For breaking tech news go to: newscientist.com/onepercent Pin the coordinates on the balloons –… to this– UCSD
