Aw maaaaan, how am I supposed to afford the trip to Toshi station for those power converters noooow???

In a stunning upset for all those teams that have already blown a few hundred thousand dollars, it looks like DARPA won’t be awarding the much-publicized cash prize for the DARPA Grand Challenge.

Amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth from competitors, Yahoo News was heard to say:

The Pentagon’s research arm, which has twice hosted the high-tech contests since 2004, blames an obscure section in a defense spending law signed by President Bush this week. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency believes the law prevents the agency from awarding the $2.7 million prize money.

Granted, 2.7 million on a robotics project on this scale is pretty much a drop in the bucket, especially seeing at robotics follows the Vast Tract of Hyperspace model of economics*, but the lack of money could frighten off potential team sponsors, and could also hurt the chances of the little guys who aren’t working with a ton of sponsorship opportunities in the first place.

Except maybe there’s hope:

Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said the agencies are still working out the details. “We are not aware of a decision to not award cash prizes,” Maka said in a statement.

We’ll be waiting here, feverishly twiddling our pwm cables until the final word from DARPA is passed down from On High.

In the meantime, competitors can at least be comforted by the knowledge that the winners will almost certainly have one reward for their endless hours of frustrating, backbreaking labor and heartbreaking expenditure of untold sums of money:

Shiny Trophies.

Mm, shiny.

That definitely makes it all worth it.

[via Slashdot]

*That is to say, no matter how much money you stuff into a certain project, there’s always room for more. Not that we’re bitter. Not us.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 20th, 2006 at 11:27 am and is filed under Neat Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.