Stanley and the Conquest of the DARPA Challenge

geekboy_x writes "Wired has a great in-depth piece on the Stanford team that won the $2 million DARPA prize. If you remember last year's disaster - with most vehicles falling off the road in the first kilometer or so - this victory becomes all the more amazing. The fact that the Stanford team used a 'tailgating' strategy is the best surprise in the article."

Comments

The part of TFA that floored me

[sikandril]

was when Thun explained how the vehicle was taught to drive by following a human driver and adapting its algorithms according to his behavior, gaining much better results than "force feeding" massive amounts of data artificially.

This has immediate implications not only for robotic cars - what if we took a human and strapped some positional sensors, voice recording, etc. and made a humanoid robot follow him throughout the day?

I mean how varied are our lives after all? Given the right processing power and sensors, the results could be interesting...

Again, a great achievement for a 'bottom up' approach to artificial intelligence

Re:Team Leaders

[maggard]

This could as easily imply that, in order to succeed, these folks had to get out of Carnegie Mellon AI and go to Stanford .

I've no inside knowledge, but from the article it appears CMU was locked into the-same-just-more/bigger/faster strategy and the team that decamped to Stanford came up with some innovative real-time confidence-based sensor interpretation systems. It may well be that at CMU they wouldn't have been supported in this whereas at Stamford, without the established regime at CMU, they were free to do so...