Saturday, October 08, 2005

Congratulations Stanford ..?

Sadly the grandchallenge.org site is a bit broken - the time of a team that has crossed the finish line does not stop - rather it keeps increasing... But I was just checking the status board when the first teams crossed the finish line: by this time the team from Stanford was ahead of Red Team Too (they started 5 minutes earlier than "Stanley") and I'm pretty sure that it was more than two minutes until the other Red Team car crossed the finish line. 3 other cars are still running, but they all have more than 50 miles to go, not more than 2 1/2 hours left (to beat Stanleys time) and all took more than 5 hours for their first 50 miles ...

Update:
engadget is also confused ... they also saw Stanley win, but then changed their mind (I guess they haven't realized that the timers did not stop). However on this page there is also a CMU student posting a comment that says that the times on the Grand Challenge page are not corrected for pauses (the referees can pause a car, for example to let another car pass, these times are deducted from the total).. if this is true, than there may be a different winner.

Update 2:
Alright, I guess by now everybody knows, but for the sake of completeness: Yes, Stanford won, it's now official.

Anyway: both RedTeams and Stanford did the track in under 8 hours - an impressive feat indeed.
On the other hand many very qualified teams did not make it through the track and I'm especially sad for team DAD, they where moving faster than all the top teams and this only relying on visual sensors and a team consisting of four technichians! From the little information that is on their website it also appears that they are using some really interesting technology. I'm certain they will be trying to market their stereo vision technology - surely a company to watch.

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