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Fifteen Teams Selected for DARPA Grand Challenge
doughnuthole writes "The official posting has been made of the 15 teams that qualified for the Grand Challenge, seven of which completed the entire QID course. The top three teams, and thus those who get to start first, were the Red Team, SciAutonics II, and Team Caltech. The race starts at 6:30 am Saturday, with teams leaving every 5 minutes. A live webcast will be available at grandchallenge.org." Reader uss_valiant writes "Tomshardware runs an article about DARPA's Grand Challenge. It features new pictures, the DARPA video of the qualification and covers some technical challenges such as the obstacle detection."
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
Oh, goody. Freshman programmers.
No offense, buddy. You're at CMU, which presumably means you're pretty smart. (I have friends who graduated CMU, and they're some of the brightest I've ever met.)
Not all freshman are novices, of course. I was programming for several years, professionally, before I went to college. I'm sure plenty of other people were, too.
But in general, it would take a hell of a software engineering environment to allow freshman programmers to contribute more than they cost. (CMU is the home of the Software Engineering Institute; maybe this was treated as a Level 4 project?)
I did some work in college for a company that tried to make software with undergrads, often freshmen. (Theoretically they were testing management techniques.) Time and again, I would track down a "bug" to a piece of code, and find that fixing it wouldn't solve the bug, only to discover that that piece of code had been copied-and-pasted to a hundred different locations, each slightly different (rather than parameterizing a function or refactoring).
My main contribution that year was to eliminate 3/4 of their code base. The fact that this software was tracking uranium for the DoE didn't make me feel any better.
Hey, if CMU can take freshmen and make productive programmers out of 'em, more power to 'em.