There were hard speed limits set on various sections of the qualifier course. The best performing vehicle, H1ghlander, executed the course within a few seconds of the best possible time given the constraints. Performance on the NQE course has about as much to do with race-success as grating cheese does with belly dancing.
At least three of the vehicles that qualified for the race have performed 170 mile runs at race-success pace on mixed road/off-road courses that should simulate race conditions very closely. Many of the vehicles have code in place that allows top speeds over forty miles per hour when long, straight, smooth sections of course are detected.
I know that the CMU teams pre-plan their runs in the two hour period between receipt of the course waypoint file and the beginning of the race. They will not load a plan designed to execute in more than ten hours and, given the quality of the competition this year, I betcha they'll be aiming at eight.
A hot issue this year that I haven't seen discussed on public forums is intent-to-pass. My understanding is that DARPA will force a vehicle into 'pause' mode if it is being overtaken by a faster competitor. I'm willing to bet there will be some post-race howling around that dynamic.
The ISP is cfx hosting. They specialize in ColdFusion solutions.
Actually I'm pretty pleased with the way they handled the incident. Our contract doesn't allow for unlimited bandwidth - they could easily have let the traffic flow and charged us an arm and a leg for it.
Further, once they decided to intervene, they could have done a lot worse than just dumping the file - I imagine most ISPs would have just shut stopped the whole site.
Finally, even at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night, I got a courtesy call about it before the tech took action.
So I get a call from one of my client's ISPs. Some guy named Charles is really alarmed about the massive amount of traffic my sleepy little robot site is generating all of a sudden.
Woohoo, my first Slashdotting!
So naturally the ISP temporarily banished the file. Thanks to everyone who put up mirrors. The file ought to be back where it belongs on 9/10.
Unrelated to the file, these guys at CMU kick ass. Despite all the DARPA downplaying that they don't exepect anyone to even complete the race in the first year, I have tremendous confidence in the Red Team to overachieve. There's a 'success at any cost' vibe coming out of that place that has to be experienced to be believed.
Slashdot Mirror
There were hard speed limits set on various sections of the qualifier course. The best performing vehicle, H1ghlander, executed the course within a few seconds of the best possible time given the constraints. Performance on the NQE course has about as much to do with race-success as grating cheese does with belly dancing.
At least three of the vehicles that qualified for the race have performed 170 mile runs at race-success pace on mixed road/off-road courses that should simulate race conditions very closely. Many of the vehicles have code in place that allows top speeds over forty miles per hour when long, straight, smooth sections of course are detected.
I know that the CMU teams pre-plan their runs in the two hour period between receipt of the course waypoint file and the beginning of the race. They will not load a plan designed to execute in more than ten hours and, given the quality of the competition this year, I betcha they'll be aiming at eight.
A hot issue this year that I haven't seen discussed on public forums is intent-to-pass. My understanding is that DARPA will force a vehicle into 'pause' mode if it is being overtaken by a faster competitor. I'm willing to bet there will be some post-race howling around that dynamic.
*shrug* stone me, whatever. It does what I need to do and synchs nicely with my ppc.
Actually, your external site is running ColdFusion.
The ISP is cfx hosting. They specialize in ColdFusion solutions.
Actually I'm pretty pleased with the way they handled the incident. Our contract doesn't allow for unlimited bandwidth - they could easily have let the traffic flow and charged us an arm and a leg for it.
Further, once they decided to intervene, they could have done a lot worse than just dumping the file - I imagine most ISPs would have just shut stopped the whole site.
Finally, even at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night, I got a courtesy call about it before the tech took action.
www.cfxhosting.com - pretty good guys
So I get a call from one of my client's ISPs. Some guy named Charles is really alarmed about the massive amount of traffic my sleepy little robot site is generating all of a sudden.
Woohoo, my first Slashdotting!
So naturally the ISP temporarily banished the file. Thanks to everyone who put up mirrors. The file ought to be back where it belongs on 9/10.
Unrelated to the file, these guys at CMU kick ass. Despite all the DARPA downplaying that they don't exepect anyone to even complete the race in the first year, I have tremendous confidence in the Red Team to overachieve. There's a 'success at any cost' vibe coming out of that place that has to be experienced to be believed.