About six months ago, my friend Justin burst into my room with a look of excitement and panic set on his face. His mouth was moving air far faster than his brain could provide it with enunciation instructions, so my roommate and I heard a syllable soup from which we could only extract the words ""DARPA... Challenge... Cars,"" before Justin passed out.
It turned out that Justin was talking about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grand Challenge, a competition in which teams from across the country design and build completely autonomous vehicles.
While the first Grand Challenge ended in failure—the lead vehicle only completed 7.4 out of 142 miles—in 2005 several vehicles successfully navigated through desert terrain without any human input.
What had Justin so excited, however, was the particular challenge in this year's Grand Challenge: city streets. While previous challenges had provided a relatively ""safe"" environment (read: no moving objects) for the cars to travel through, this time the vehicles will be completing tasks at the same time in various locations around a simulated town.
They'll have to deal with stop signs, road designs and, of course, other cars maneuvering the course at the same time.
When you live with engineers and science-minded folk, even if you don't count yourself among their number, you become used to this sort of reaction to an interesting idea or problem. Many of the most well-known quotes about science refer to the startling amount of work that must be invested to produce one good idea. One percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration and all that jazz.
And so my roommate and I got caught up in the fervor of the DARPA Project. We gathered our friends and sat around in our rooms, filling up whiteboards with phrases like ""Machine Vision: Neuron Approach"" and ""Border Detection Platform."" We went to a conference, read papers and wrote pages of notes on mathematical techniques for turning a picture from a video camera into ""TURN RIGHT! YOU'RE GONNA HIT THAT VOLVO!""
In the end, however, we fell victim to another common ailment of the technically minded: a lack of funding. But our hopes live on that some day, we too may be able to burst forth from our secret lab (hey, we're scientists, we like our nerdy stereotypes) with a brilliant discovery that changes the face of the world forever.
When the time comes for the rest of the Grand Challenge participants to turn the keys and set their cars on ""automatic,"" we'll be there, in spirit if not in body, cheering on their technical achievements, and cursing the man who decided that cars should be worth more than 59 cents.
Until then, I'll be playing World of Warcraft. No, seriously.
Keaton Miller is hiding from his true engineering calling by majoring in math and economics. You can find him under the pseudonym ""Nilamil"" on the Executus server. No, seriously. You can attempt an intervention by writing to him at keatonmiller@wisc.edu, but it probably won't work.
