Funny in the pilot of that third stargate sg1 spin off , The government planted unsolved alien puzzles in popular video games in the odd chance that a pimple faced geek with allot of smarts living in his mothers basement could solve the riddle of the 9th chevron that stumped the best minds the military had at its disposal.
It's not as crazy as it sounds. Keep in mind it's not like it's ONE geek, it's billions of them around the world simultaneously trying to solve the problem, possibly working together online and trading information on what they did. When you put it into that perspective, it sounds entirely reasonable to expect a solution to eventually pop up that only a few (by comparison) military research personal could come up with.
In fact this sort of "crowd sourcing" has already proven useful to NASA. They have been getting help from amateur astronomers for years in sorting out massive databases of images that their personnel alone would take decades to go through.