That's what I was thinking. Then I saw this "rule" on the website:
U.S. government agencies will not be allowed to participate in PAM and DARPA will not have access to the identities or funds of PAM traders.
I thought this whole thing might just be a set-up to track terrorists and rogue states who may have designs in playing this market and making the predictions come true. If this clause is accurate, I would say this is a very stupid and potentially dangerous exercise.
It seems that most of you guys don't "get it". This project is extremely good at identifying below-the-radar terrorist activities, but it has nothing to do with the people actually playing the game, hence why the identities are irrelevant. The players are required to generate a good model of the information dynamics behind the gameplay.
The mathematics is pretty complex, but this "game" allows a very sophisticated traffic analysis of information that can provide the DoD with the ability to identify "hotspots" that are not directly observable. It sounds a bit weird, but it means that they can use this information to identify terrorist plots even if none of the players of the game are specifically aware of a terrorist plot. For it to work reasonably well, they need to allow the general population to play anonymously so that they don't inadvertently bias the model, which is also why the DoD personnel can't play. They need a really nice statistical baseline from the general population.
I happen to be acquainted with the guy who originally came up with this idea, which is actually many years old. He is an economist with very savvy math skills, and definitely one of the smarter humans walking the planet at the moment.
What you are looking at is the DoD using extremely advanced mathematics that is capable of identifying terrorists even if the terrorists don't play the game and hide themselves very well from the general population. You just have to recognize it as yet another example of wicked cool technology coming out of the DoD to give the USA an edge against everyone else. The people against this are clueless, but I don't think it has been explained very well (and a REAL explanation is fairly esoteric).
Why do I somehow suspect that UIDs for this mkt won't be exactly, er, sacrosanct? </ wry grin>