User:De-Hyping Stan

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I noticed that the Wikipedia article on the Stanley (vehicle) links to an article of WIRED magazine that is rather biased in my opinion, and in the Stanford AI lab home page I just found this announcement of another one: "Dec 29, 2005: Stanford built three of the top ten robots ever! According to a recent evaluation by Wired Magazine, three of Stanford's robots were among the top ten robots ever: Stanley (Number 1), Shakey (Number 5), and the Stanford Cart (Number 10). Wired Magazine polled numerous experts to determine the 50 Best Robots Ever. Check it out!"

The problem is, of course, that WIRED is based in San Francisco and has strong ties to Stanford. Local patriotism may be fun, but few if any unbiased roboticists would agree with that list.

So what kind of "experts" did they poll? Maybe cartoonists, since Number 2 is a fictional Japanese comic strip robot. The other cars that finished shortly after Stanley are not even mentioned...

Probably the list is not meant to be taken seriously. Any serious list would be dominated by real Japanese robots (and would not even mention fictional ones), since Japan dominates robotics research and has 40 percent of the world's robots, including many of the most expensive and sophisticated and famous ones. I don't think any mere car would rank among the top 5. But don't expect WIRED to publish such a list!

Nevertheless, I'd like to state my opinion that Wikipedia articles such as this one might want to link to a bit more objective sources. De-Hyping Stan 17:27, 27 March 2006 (UTC)