The Grand Challenge seems to have struck a nerve with the rest of the media, who are all writing articles about the people behind the vehicles. The New York Times has this nice peice on the Return of AI:
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers.But the work of a small team of researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is helping to restore credibility to the field. The team's winning robotic Volkswagen, named Stanley, covered the unpaved course in just 6 hours and 53 minutes without human intervention and guided only by global positioning satellite waypoints.
The feat, which won a $2 million prize from the Pentagon Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, was compared by exuberant Darpa officials to the Wright brothers' accomplishment at Kitty Hawk, because it was clear that it was not a fluke. Twenty-two of the 23 vehicles that started this year did as well or better than the seven miles completed by the best vehicle last year.
The ability of the vehicles to complete a complex everyday task - driving - underscores how artificial intelligence may at last be moving beyond the research laboratory.
While artificial intelligence technology is already in use in telephone answering systems with speech recognition and in popular household gadgets like the iRobot vacuum cleaner, none of the existing systems have been as ambitious as Darpa's Grand Challenge road race.
This leap was possible, in large part, because researchers are moving from an approach that relied principally on logic and rule-based systems to more probability or statistics-oriented software technologies.
"In the past A.I. has been dominated by symbolic systems and now the world is gray," said Terrence J. Sejnowski, head of the computational neurobiology laboratory at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif. "That's what it's like to deal with the real world."
As they say, read the whole thing.
Posted by elkaim at October 14, 2005 10:46 PM