They say that "Racing improves the breed." The thought comes, obviously, from the world of horse racing, when two own-ers settle the argument of whose animal is faster by actually running them side by side, but it easily transfers to other areas in which at least two people pit their "champions" against each other in a competition.
This past week, one such competition has been going on across the outback of Australia.
Reuters reports that "Twenty-two bug-shaped solar cars designed and built by corporations and universities from around the world" took off in the eighth World Solar Challenge. Entries come from ten countries, including the U.S., France, Canada, Hol-land and Japan. The race is held every two years.
They are to travel 1,860 miles from the city of Darwin on the tropical north coast of the continent south to Adelaide.
The Japanese entry, Sky Ace Tiga, from Ashiva University in Osaka, qualified fastest and was the lead off entry. Professor Kunio Nakagawa claims his team's car is capable of averaging 59 mph.
The record for the race is 30 hours, 54 minutes. That was set in 2003 by the Dutch entry, Nuna 3, which won the past two races.
Add military interest to the concept of "improving the breed" and you get some real progress.
Witness the development of the airplane. Less that 50 years from the Wright brothers' first flight at Kill Devil Hill, NC, jets were dogfighting in the skies over Korea. War accelerated development of the machines.
Next month in Nevada, a contest will get underway pitting robots against each other to see whose combination of computer and mechanical tricks is best.
The Associated Press reports the competition, first held 18 months ago, is sponsored by The Pentagon to "speed the develop-ment of unmanned vehicles for combat."
The first race, offering a prize of one million dollars, was not too encouraging. The entries mostly swerved off the course or stalled out.
This year's race, with a prize of $2 million, has attracted a larger field, including garage mechanics, universities and corpora-tions.
According to the AP, the entries have more computer intelligence and tougher mechanical gear to help them negotiate the 150 mile course across the Nevada desert.
The course starts and ends in the casino town of Primm, on the Nevada-California border.
They must be capable of getting from Start to Finish on their own, using sensors and on board cameras to figure out how to get around the natural and manmade obstacles they will face. Humans are not allowed to provide input once the machine be-gins.
Two hours before start time, organizers will give each team a CD-ROM that holds the GPS coordinates that will define the course.
The military connection? The Pentagon is sponsoring the contest through its research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA.
DARPA's best known successfully assisted project is something you may have heard of, the Internet.
Director Anthony Tether told AP that he hopes the course can be covered by one or more of the robots in less than ten hours.
If any of the entrants can accomplish that, DARPA will not sponsor the contest again. They will have what they are after.
If none are successful, the prize will double to $4 million.
Maybe "Star Wars," with its armies of mechanical clones, was not science fiction but prophecy.