The long tail of the X prize
March 17th, 02008 by Alexander Rose 
Stewart Brand was quoted in this weekends NY Times piece on how the many X Prizes seem to be driving many areas of innovation (automotive, space travel, genomics etc). Peter Diamandis the director of the X Prize Foundation will be speaking in our Seminar Series in September on this exact issue…
The complexities of creating the auto prize illustrate a wider problem of how to come up with ever more novel tests of human ingenuity over time. Mr. Brand of the Long Now Foundation predicts that contests will soon pursue “things we truly think of as impossible.”
Mr. Brand’s wish list includes machines that defy gravity or that allow us to read the minds of other people.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
The “wider problem of how to come up with ever more novel tests of human ingenuity” suggests the need for an X Prize Prize.
It’s interesting to note that the X prizes to date seem reward engineering, not primary research. That’s fine–primary research has the Nobel prizes–but it does lend a bit of credence to the idea that the X prizes take things that work in the lab and make them work in the field rather than bringing new developments to the lab. There are some problems that are just flat-out hard on the basic research end, things like a cure for cancer or a machine that can pass a no-holds-barred Turing test, where there’s already a pretty good amount of research funding and a clear reward for success, that the X Prize format probably wouldn’t accelerate.
As for machines that defy gravity, every time I see an airplane maneuver those big, fixed wings around the ramp, or consider the inherent instability of a helicopter or an airship’s vulnerability to the weather, I can’t help but think there must be a better way to get off the ground. I don’t know if it’s a folding wing ornithopter, a computer-stabilized ducted-fan hover car, or even Tom Swift’s Repelatron, but it’d be interesting to set up the parameters for the prize and see what people come up with.