Rossum's Children

Grand Challenge official times have still not been posted. Rumours are flying and the last bot with a shot at finishing (Gray) is now less than 7 miles from the finish line.

Red Team Racing has some fantastic links in their race day blog.

It includes a link to a much better route map and a google maps hack that shows the course information.

But far more interesting then their excellent visual aides is their final blog entry for the day. At 5:30 PM PDT, they posted this cryptic snippet:
Officially, DARPA has announced that "There is a Grand Challenge winner, but we are just not sure who it is yet". DARPA will pause vehicles overnight, and finish the challenge tomorrow, the 9th. This marks the end of this blog for today.

I'm not sure what the story is here. Perhaps it's just a simple governmental screw up. Perhaps there was a major timing error or some minor rule is being squabbled over. Hopefully it will all be resolved soon. In any case, according to the 'live' tracking data from the GrandChallenge.org website, Gray is still out there and running. This means one of two things: either the vehicles haven't been paused or the tracking information is even more screwed up than we all thought when we realized the timers didn't stop as soon as the robots crossed the finish line.