Detailed Review of X PRIZEs in Discover

Should American Science Be More Like "American Idol"? - Discover:

One morning while I was visiting, Diamandis sat in his corner office with his assistant at the time, Angel Panlasigui, and waded through potential prize ideas in advance of a board meeting. One possibility, hashed out with James Cameron, director of the movie Titanic, would foster the development of three-man submarines that could dive to the ocean floor. The next idea took the concept to a fantastic level: autonomous robots, cheap enough to mass-produce, that could sink to the bottom of the sea, collect data, and return to the surface to share that data with a central computer. “This is an idea that I kicked around with Larry Page,” Diamandis explained. “If you have thousands of these going down randomly, gathering data, you then can stitch the data all together.”

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