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DARPA Robot Contest Update
rbrandis writes "DARPA has selected a wide variety of teams, after a series of last minute rule changes and a solid outpouring of anger, the final list of competitors for DARPA's Grand Challenge robot race has been set with 25 teams preparing to try and win a $1 million prize." The anger is exemplified by submissions like this one: Totally_Lost writes "Last spring we flocked to DARPA's Grand Challenge media event in Los Angeles to be told that they wanted everyone's participation in their Robot race this March. They told us that the race would be open to Mom and Pop garage sized participants - and Lied. This fall, nearly 100 teams completed technical paper submissions, with about half to be eliminated from the $1M prize race because they were too small to be 'real' competitors. Well, the rejected robot racing teams got together in Las Vegas last month, and formed the International Robot Racing Federation. This month IRRF is announcing its first competition with $1M in prizes pledged by sponsors, and lesser prizes too, to be offered in a REAL OPEN Challenge next September (providing the race that DARPA failed to deliver)."
I'm pretty good at smelling a troll, and this one reeks. A quick search of Google shows us that this exact same comment was posted here over 2 months ago. The parent is probably using the Anti-Slash Database Tool to find and search out previous popular posts.
In addition, the parent is a brand-new account, with an already rich posting history of highly-moderated comments, some of which are reposted from older articles.
Also, if you carefully read between the lines, you will notice the posts by this user bear a striking resembelance to those of Sir Haxalot, Pingular, and Steve 'Rim' Jobs, all of which are accounts created by the same user for the purposes of karma-whoring and building up large amounts of karma very quickly in an effor to use this to his advantage while trolling.
Please moderate his post down so this trolling karma-whore will not be able to annoy others and carefully work the system. If you fear the wrath of Meta-mod, you can always rate him as "Overrated" which gives negative karma but does not go to M2.
This has been a public service announcement from a helpful Slashdot user. Posted anonymously to avoid the groupthink.
You may want to check out RARS, a simulator framework in which you can write programs to run in a simulated auto race against other programs. I haven't messed with RARS in a while, but at the time I was using it, (IIRC) your driver was a C++ class that received a huge struct as a parameter and returned a small struct indicating the direction you wanted to steer and a number indicating gas/brake magnitude.
But what do I know -- my car could barely make it around the track without running into the wall.