We’ve been talking about alternatives to the command-and-control style of massive institutions like NASA.
Here’s an alternative:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) intends to conduct a race of autonomous ground vehicles (see “Technical Details” for a definition) from the vicinity of Los Angeles, CA to Las Vegas, NV in 2004. A cash prize will be awarded to the winner. The course will feature both on-road and off-road portions and will include extremely rugged, challenging terrain and obstacles. The purpose of the race is to stimulate interest in and encourage the accelerated development of autonomous ground vehicle technologies that could be used by the US military.
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A $1,000,000 cash prize will be awarded to the eligible team fielding the vehicle that successfully completes the course with an elapsed time that is shorter than the elapsed time of all other race vehicles and is within a pre-set maximum time limit. The winning team will be officially recognized at the next DARPATech, a technical conference hosted by DARPA. The winning team will be invited to display the winning vehicle and present a paper detailing their design.There will be no prizes for anything other than first place. If no vehicle completes the course within the time limit, no prize will be awarded.
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Just a thought…
There’s also the X-Prize (http://www.xprize.org) for the first team to build and launch a spaceship able to carry three people to 100km twice within one week…
$1 million is enough to get some schools involved. it is not enough for private companies.
Also with no sub prizes the incentive to invest $$$$ in the project is reduced because the chance of offsetting some of the cost of development is small.
They would have been better off having a number of prizes to reduce the risk of development and get more competitors into the field.