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  3. The Tapping of Automatic Intelligence Car Last year, America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, thought it

The Tapping of Automatic Intelligence Car Last year, America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, thought it

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问题                  The Tapping of Automatic Intelligence Car
    Last year, America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, thought it would be a good idea to organize a robot race across the Nevada desert. The idea of the Grand Challenge, as DARPA dubbed it, was for autonomous robot vehicles to steer a 227km (142 mile) course and claim a $ 1 million jackpot. This would be a first step towards DARPA’s ultimate goal of being able to build unmanned self-driving military vehicles and thus keep American troops out of harm’s way on the battlefield.
    This year’s crop of 23 entrants were offered an even greater incentive—a $ 2 million prize for the winner. That, plus the intervening 18 months, seems to have done the trick. This time, five vehicles finished the 211 km course. The winner, a modified Volkswagen Touareg dubbed Stanley by its makers, a team from Stanford University, did it in a mere six hours and 54 minutes.
    Stanley was, of course, specially hardened by its designers for the rough terrain of the Nevada desert. The clever bit, however, was the vehicle’s brain. This was designed and built by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).
    Stanley’s brain consists of six top-of-the-range Pentium chips wired collaboratively together. It is programmed with special software that is able to learn from its mistakes. This software mastered the tricks of collision-avoidance in a of desert test runs conducted before the race started.
    Like all brains, Stanley’s has a range of sensory inputs to process. A global positioning system (GPS) receiver tells it where on the Earth’s surface it is. Television cameras, radar and four laser-based distance monitors tell it what its surroundings are like. By comparing its GPS location with its pre-programmed destination (announced only a few hours before the race began), it knew which way it wanted to go. And, by studying its surroundings, it could work out what looked like the safest route that was also in approximately the right direction.
    Although Stanley carried off the laurels, the other four finishers did respectably. Sandstorm managed a time just ten minutes behind the winner while her sister vehicle Highlander came in ten minutes after that. GrayBot and TerraMax, the other two course-completers, came in at seven hours 30 minutes and 12 hours 51 minutes, respectively.
    So smart, autonomous vehicles can, indeed, find their way across several hundred kilometres of desert. The question is, what next? DARPA’s answer, of course, will be to go down the military route. But this sort of technology has obvious civilian applications as well as Sebastian Thrun. the head of both SAIL and the Stanford racing team, is keen to emphasize.
    Dr. Thrun thinks that it could lead to self-driving road vehicles within 30 years and—more immediately—to greatly improved collision-avoidance systems. Whether the freeways of California will prove as easy to navigate as the gulches of Nevada, though, remains to be seen.
Stanley won the race most probably because______.
选项 A、there were only 23 vehicles competing in the race
B、it has 18 months to prepare for the race
C、it is specially made for the desert
D、the brain of the vehicle was delicate and intelligent
答案D
解析 推理判断题。根据题干中的Stanley定位至第二段末句。该句介绍了获胜机器人Stanley的基本情况，第三段提到了Stanley的特性：The clever bit，however，was the vehicle’s brain。此外第四段首句指出：Stanley的头部装有六个最高级的奔腾芯片，由电线连接起来。由此可以推断Stanley获胜的原因可能在于它具有精密、聪明的头部，故[D]为答案。第二段首句指出参赛者共23个，但文中其他地方没有提及参赛者个数与Stanley获胜的关系，排除[A]；该段第二句提到intervening 18 months，这是各参赛者共同的准备时间，不是Stanley获胜的决定因素，排除[B]；第三段首句提到Stanley经过设计者专门加固以应付内华达高低起伏的沙漠地势，C是由此设计的干扰项，这是Stanley获胜的一个原因，但由该段第二句可知，这是次要原因，排除[C]。
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