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The PDAC conference is legendary because of its giant booze-fueled parties, and there were none bigger on Sunday night than the one hosted by Integra Gold Corp., which named the winners of their clever “Gold Rush Challenge.”
The contest began last year, after Integra acquired a project in Quebec that came with six terabytes of mining records dating back 1933. The company put all the information on the internet and invited the general public to find gold. More than 1,300 people entered the contest, with $1 million of prizes up for grabs to the peak submissions.
Some from the submissions were just a little dubious; one guy apparently claimed he had X-Ray glasses and could see through our planet’s crust. But there were many strong ones too.
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- Read our entire coverage of PDAC 2016
The five finalists in the contest faced a final round of judgment at Sunday’s party, as they made their pitches “Shark Tank”-style to some number of five well-known mining entrepreneurs sitting onstage. The audience watched and cheered them on. (OK, the audience mostly just drank. But still.) The winning team, called SGS Geostat, walked away with $500,000.
Integra earned lots of praise over the niche for this contest, because it was considered a cutting-edge way to put bright minds to work and collect useful information. If the company constitutes a major gold discovery about this land, the $1 million in prizes it gave out will be a bargain.
In the spirit from the competition, Integra chairman George Salamis designed a speech by which he called around the industry to become more innovative. He explained he is tired of all of the doom and gloom within the mining space and thinks individuals need to maneuver on.
“We must challenge and abandon old-school thinking,” he urged the crowd of about 400 people.
The Integra contest was inspired by the Goldcorp Challenge, a public contest launched in 2000 that helped Goldcorp Inc. identify drilling targets at its Red Lake camp. Rob McEwen, who was Goldcorp’s chief executive at the time, would be a member of Integra’s “Shark Tank” panel on Sunday.
