A Singapore Sling and $100K to conquer Google.
Posted on January 22nd, 2008 by Simon Chen
Singapore is a wonderful place. I should know. I lived there for 5 years. An innovation hothouse though it is not.
Apparently, a very eccentric arm of the all encompassing government - the Agency for Science, Technology & Research has offered a US$100K prize for the individual or team who can deliver the “mother of all algorithms” to the Lion City within 8 months.
The task is pretty simple really. From the agency website…
Contestants are required to create a search engine that can identify search terms found not only in text within websites, but in music and video files as well.
How hard could it be? You could probably even post the project on Elance or Rent-A-Coder.
What a croc.
Last week the Singapore Government just sent US$5 billion to Merrill Lynch to give them a bit of a hand with their balance sheet. That’s a gamble not even the most hard core punter in a casino would take now, given the blood on the floors of every trading room on the planet over the last 24 hours.
But it’s the sort of figure that would be needed in todays term to get anywhere near Mountain View.
If any government wants to get serious about the search space, $100 grand wont buy the meals and coke (ie the drink) that the programmers would need.
And anyway, after all of 13 people have submitted something, what the hell will the government do with the code? Look at it. Maybe play with it for a bit.
Lets be serious for a moment. The government (any government) has no business being in the search space. They cant possibly expect to compete. Or win.
If Singapore allowed free speech and had a free press, this would make great material for tomorrows comic strip.
In the meantime, I’m off to hire a group of coders from a small middle eastern country and a little town in India somewhere…I’ll let you know how I go.
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on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Google, Search Engines.
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