depth first search

I think the MIT team has a very clever payout structure. Join my team: http://balloon.media.mit.edu/stober/ and start looking for red balloons!

UPDATE: One aspect of this challenge that is not accounted for by all the “standard” approaches is the problem of dealing with “malicious” data. I imagine that some teams are planning on making many false reports of balloon sightings through social networks and through the various public balloon finding cooperatives. I haven’t heard much about this information war element, but I’m guessing that the winning team is probably going to be one that has some kind of strategy both for dealing with location spam and transmitting a good deal of that kind of disruptive information themselves.