The Famous DARPA Grand Challenge

 The DARPA challenge of 2005 was the first major event which made people believe in Artificial Intelligence 

As every success is handly accompanied with failures so as this. The first DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ) Challenge was conducted on March 13, 2004 by DARPA the most prominent research organization of United states Department of Defense. It was a prize competition. The aim of the such competitions were  to make the fundamental discoveries effectively and profoundly used in military. The DARPA challenge was to make a fully automatic unmanned vehicle which can steer through rough terrain. The first event was held on March 13 2004 in the Mojave desert of Unites states along the length of 240 km crossing 15 states. To a great surprise none finished the race, Carnegies Mellon University's Red Team and car Sandstrom went farthest to mere 12 km. No winner was declared and the cash prize was not given to anyone. This was the time when almost everyone had lost the very little flickering faith on AI because getting failure in an event which almost the world is looking up to gives you deep sense of bitterness. Nevertheless the next DARPA challenge was scheduled in 2005.

Now we all are familiar with driverless cars. All these auto navigable cars and automatic cars have a long history of R&D. So on 8 October 2005 DARPA launched its second driverless car racing competition which was almost 212km long in Navajo Desert in Nevada. to a great success all but one car passed the 12 km mark which was highest distanced travelled in 2004. A small victory in itself. To a greater victory 5 cars completed the race. One of  very interesting story regarding this is that the university who won the competition which was Stanford University whose team was lead by Sebastian Thrun (the founder of Udacity) was very less experienced in comparison to CMU who came second. Sebastian took a group of undergrads together with researchers and maximum of the work was done by undergrads and they developed various interesting new algorithms and had a modern approach to every problem . They had their car named 'Stanley'. The team which was the favorite of the competition was CMU's team lead by Red Whitaker who was very famous for building driverless cars and had a legacy. CMU's team didn't have one but two entries into the competition, one was 'Highlander' and the other was called 'Sandstorm' and I know you will be amazed to read that Sandstorm's job was to just follow the leader and come second so that they have at least one car finishing in the podium and Highlander was expected to win but Highlander started having engine failure and was going crazy at times but Sandstorm played a perfect race.

Then Whitaker chucked the car in garage because he couldn't understand what was wrong with Highlander. After 12 long years when he got the car out from the Garage and cleaned it while the cleaning process they realized that there was a filter which connected the engine module with the fuel injectors and when you touch the filter it stopped working and when you remove the touch it was working. So they made little changes in the filter and that's it it started working the smoothest. So just due to this simplest of the component that malfunctioned the whole car got stuck. 

So AI sometimes becomes so vast that you almost read theories of every realm of science  while studying AI. DARPA challenge was the first ever event that made people believe that AI is the future and it is going to change lives of human.