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Google’s $30m race to the moon is ready for lift-off
- melling 11y agoThe idea of using a prize to solve a big problem goes back hundreds of years. The British created a prize to solve the Longitude problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_Act Charles Lindbergh won his prize money for crossing the Atlantic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_St._Louis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_St._Louis The Google autonomous car is here because of DARPA prize: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge Netflix has their contest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix_Prize And of course, we have the modern X-Prizes: http://www.xprize.org http://www.xprize.org Anyway, the point is that we could solve a 1000 problems if we found the money for it. Prizes like these seem to be a very effective way to invest in R&D.