Seems like a hackathon. s/hack/work/ . Compared to the $1m netflix prize from 2006, $3.5k seems like a meagre bounty. There may be the case where someone has

Seems like a hackathon. s/hack/work/ . Compared to the $1m netflix prize from 2006, $3.5k seems like a meagre bounty. There may be the case where someone has already been thinking hard about solving similar problems for the last couple of years, and this challenge falls fairly easily into a framework they've already got in place, so it is relatively quick and easy to crank the handle to generate a challenge submission (or a paper or whatever).