Stanford's Stanley wins DARPA Grand Challenge

tonyquan writes "DARPA has just announced that Stanford's "Stanley" autonomous ground vehicle has won the Grand Challenge, a $2 million contest for driverless vehicles over a 132 mile course in California's Mohave Desert. Stanley's winning time over the course was 6 hours, 53 minutes and 58 seconds, for an average speed of 19.1 mph. Second was Carnegie Mellon's Sandstorm (7:04:50), third went to another CMU vehicle "H1ghlander" (7:14:00) and fourth to the Gray Team's KAT-5 (7:30:16) More info from DARPA."

Comments

Re:so wait..

[Surt]

I'm sorry, but there's no pretense about this: the competition is designed to help the defense department deliver on its promise to congress to get most of its ground assault vehicles unmanned in the 2010 to 2015 time frame. They state it explicitly, and all over the place. The universities competing in this competition know perfectly well they're helping the armed forces kill people.

Integrity of the Stanford University Team Leader

[despinoza]

Maybe it has not incurred to anyone yet, but if you check out Sebastian Thurn's homepage, and download his C.V. http://robots.stanford.edu/cv.html (bottom of the page) or even check on the home page of the Carnegie Mellon University http://news.cs.cmu.edu/Releases/demo/33.html, he said correctly in German that he did obtain his VORDIPLOM. He, however translates this as having attained his B.Sc.. If you check with the German translation engine Leo (provided by the University of Munich), and enter the name VORDIPLOM into the box dict.leo.org, the following items come up: intermediate diploma das Vordiplom p intermediate examination das Vordiplom p pre-degree das Vordiplom p. Given that a Vordiplom is NOT a degree leading to a profession, but a pre-degree and that as a rule of thumb, it should be attained after TWO years of study, and a B.Sc. (Honours degree) can take up to FOUR years, Mr. Thrun has either a poor command in the English language, or for his U.S. employers, he has not told the truth, I am afraid to say. I think academic integrity should also entail the respective person's C.V.!

Re:so wait..

[ashooner]

Yes, defending our country, as in being on the other side of the world when a major natural disaster strikes. Well done.
Or perhaps defending those 'other people' by, for instance, invading their country and bombing their cities (and refusing to calculate civilian casualties, since it's not their job).

So to recap: To defend me, the military attacks other countries. To defend others, the military attacks their countries. Also, in defending said others, the military doesn't care how many of them they have killed.

If this is defense, you can keep it.

I'm not against the military, but if you equate "pre-emption" with defense, you need to revisit a dictionary (not to mention a 20th century history book)