According to his next post:

What I didn’t say is that it was the last day of my summer internship. The next summer they invited me back again. Everyone understood it was a mistake, but by officially firing me, someone had been punished … :)

"As a technologist, you know that the worst thing that you can do is over-constrain the problem before you start. You'll kill creativity and prevent yourself from getting a truly great outcome."

As an engineer, I love hearing firm constraints from the beginning. The constraints are what breed elegance; there is no such thing as an elegant solution when there is no shape to the problem. It's nice if the constraints are prioritized so you know what to give up if you can't satisfy them all. But there's nothing quite like saying "Yeah, we did this thing in two weeks that everyone assumed was impossible, and we did it without a binary push" or "Through our clever architecture, we accomplished with one server what everyone thought required a whole rack."

I believe design is the same way. The designs I've seen where the dictum is "Let your creativity run wild!" tend to be uninspired, while the ones I've seen where it's "This is what the user is trying to accomplish, and we have a 4 inch screen and 10 seconds to hook them" are often much more creative.

As a manager, the constraints are annoying. But one consequence of that is that setting firm constraints will tend to shift your culture from being manager-centric to being engineer- and designer-centric, which IMHO is a good thing.

At first I was like "Why would you do that for only $1m? If you had that big of a breakthrough, you could easily generate that (and then a lot more) by selling it yourself." Then I read that they aren't taking the IP, and are just giving you the cash as a pure incentive. They can publish your high level approach documents, but you still own the invention.

I wish more of these contests were run that way. I think they'd yield much high quality and differentiated results with a lot more entrants.