The Power of Challenges
Alexander Graham Bell may have been pursuing the Volta Prize.James Clerk Maxwell may have been pursuing the Adams Prize.
Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP), or CASP Prize
Significant breakthroughs in computer vision, OCR, and computational geometry have come from the Vesuvius Challenge.
Substantial amounts of the Indian state of Maharashtra have been through the Farmer Cup of the Paani Foundation.
Self-driving cars were almost entirely catalyzed by the DARPA Grand Challenge, one of many challenges published, promoted, and hosted by DARPA.
The challenges do not need any immediate, direct commercial application. In many ways, it is better that there is none -- it allows for more authenticity in promotion, and widens the net to allow anyone anywhere to feel like they might have a shot. For instance, the Kremer Prize was largely the project of the British Aeronautics industry. Yet, they did not create a challenge for "fuel efficient airplanes." Instead, the challenge was to create an aircraft that could run a small obstacle course with only "human power" -- resulting in a panoply of designs that would allow planes to take off and glide in a manner essentially like pedaling a bicycle.
Biology was constrained by an enormous challenge: predicting how proteins fold into their 3D structures from their amino acid sequences. Noting that this challenge was too big for individual researchers, and that they would need to attract the attention of people skilled with computer science rather than biology, UC Davis Genome Center’s Dr. Krzysztof Fidelis and Professor John Moult (University of Maryland) set up the prize in 1994, and an organization to administrate it, the Protein Structure Prediction Center.
played a pivotal role in the development and validation of AlphaFold, the revolutionary AI system that solved the decades-long “protein folding problem.”
John Mault started a competition to use computer modeling CASP Prize