"Challenge: Create a game. The game can be of any theme or genre you desire, but there is one restriction: You're creating a 'new classic,' like Chess, Tag or card games. So, create a game to be enjoyed by generations of players for a thousand years. Prize: $1,000 to the winning entrant, to be announced and awarded January 1, 2012." Daniel Solis' Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge. [more inside]
posted by bayani on May 23, 2011 - 61 comments

Inducement Prizes -- Best known for the Ansari X Prize, the DARPA Grand Challenge and the Clay Mathematics Millennium Problems, inducement prizes have a long history, but their recent successes have led to increased government interest, viz. challenge.gov, and resulted in the development of vaccines, thanks in large part to the work of Michael Kremer.^* [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Jan 6, 2011 - 8 comments

The day you have been waiting for all year has arrived: the 2010 winners of the Gowanus Studio Space Jell-O Mold Competition have been announced!
posted by emilyd22222 on Jul 12, 2010 - 8 comments

(all links possibly nsfw) This weekend, Jay Cutler tries to win back from Dexter Jackson the greatest prize in professional bodybuilding - the title of Mr. Olympia. [You may have heard of one of them.] [more inside]
posted by Joe Beese on Sep 25, 2009 - 42 comments

What makes for a great champagne chair? Design Within Reach sponsored a holiday contest to design a chair constructed from the cork and wire cages of champagne bottle. Judges had a difficult time deciding from the 400 entries that poured in. (via Buzz.)
posted by madamjujujive on Jan 19, 2004 - 7 comments

Cheese rolling Of all the weird and wonderful things I've read about this week, this really takes the cheese.
posted by lunadust on May 30, 2003 - 15 comments

Remember Zork, Planetfall, and the other creations of late game company Infocom? Well, "interactive fiction," as the format is called, is still alive and well. Every year the IF community -- which is known for releasing work of quality far surpassing even Infocom's masterpieces -- holds a competition for short works, and this year's contestants have been released! Read this post's comments for more info...
posted by tweebiscuit on Sep 30, 2001 - 13 comments

The Poincaré Conjecture: If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the the surface of the apple is ‘simply connected,’ but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out be be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.

...but if you can prove it, [or any of six other 'millenium prize problems'] the clay mathematics institute wants to line your pockets with $1M
posted by palegirl on May 24, 2000 - 3 comments

Saatchi and Saatchi are once again accepting submissions for their innovation in communication awards. The deadline is approaching, and your idea better be revolutionary. Look at some of the past winners (I'd add a direct link here, but it's all flash), there are some amazing innovations there. The site is a little overboard on the flash, I know they won an award for their previous contest site, but the current one is hard to navigate, slow to load, and offers no non-flash alternative. Odd that they want to enhance communication, but their site is kind of hostile to that ideal.
posted by mathowie on Mar 30, 2000 - 1 comment