The Department of Mad Scientists by Michael Belfiore

Author:Michael Belfiore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-01-20T22:00:00+00:00

THE GOLEM GROUP’S cherry red Toyota Prius was in trouble. This machine was the minimalist of the competition. Instead of the racks of servers and extensive sensor arrays of the other cars on the course, the Prius had only one LIDAR on its roof with which to sense its environment and just a single laptop computer with a dual-core processor to gather data from that one sensor and make all the decisions the car needed to drive. One core, or central processing chip, interpreted the data coming in from the sensor using one software package, and the other core ran the decision-making and execution software. Now the car sat on the left-turn-and-merge course, called Test Area A, and refused to move forward.

The course tested the robot cars’ ability to make left-hand turns in the face of rather heavy traffic created by the human drivers in their Ford Tauruses. Making a left-hand turn can be dangerous, even for a flesh-and-blood driver, and the viewing area set up at this part of the Urban Challenge course quickly became the most popular spot for spectators because it was most conducive to accidents and because, unlike on the other two test courses, all of the action was in view.

The Golem Group’s run had gone smoothly at first, with their car making seven or eight uneventful laps around the course, successfully stopping at intersections, waiting for the human-driven Ford Tauruses to clear, signaling, and turning left. But the car got hung up on a turn, with something in its thousands of lines of computer code telling it to stop, even though no cross-traffic confronted it. After giving the machine a decent interval to make up its mind, DARPA officials put it in pause mode and let the members of the Golem Group make adjustments. With tweaks made, the members of the team drove their car back to the starting point and bailed out, the judge blew an air horn, and the car again was left to its own devices.

This time the machine apparently felt even less like cooperating. It needed to straighten out its front wheels to head into the straightaway to reach the next intersection, the one directly before the spectators. As it turned the wheel to the left, it nudged the gas to drive forward. Problem was, the car’s brain didn’t get the message that the application of gas had been successful. So it gave itself more gas. And more and more. With the wheel still turned, it surged forward, hopped the curb separating the pretend roadway from the rest of the parking lot that contained the course, and kept bombing along, even after it blew a front tire. “Pause! Pause! Pause!” cried the judges. When the car finally shuddered to a halt, hubcap rolling away from the car like some kind of metallic tumbleweed, the machine was in no condition to continue the event. A flatbed tow truck soon pulled up to cart it away.

Red Whittaker’s Boss seemed almost human as it gunned its way through the straightaways of Test Area A.

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