2005年高考英语湖北卷 - 阅读理解D

Thirteen vehicles lined up last March to race across the Mojave Desert, seeking a million in prize money. To win, they had to finish the 142-mile race in less than 10 hours. Teams and watchers knew there might be no winner at all, because these vehicles were missing a key part-drivers.
去年3月13辆车列队穿越莫哈韦沙漠，竞争100万奖金。为了获胜，他们必须在10小时内完成142英里的比赛。车队和观察者知道可能根本没有赢家，因为这些车辆缺少了一个关键部件。

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, organized the race as part of a push to develop robotic vehicles for future battlefields. But the Grand Challenge, as it was called, just proved how difficult it is to get a car to speed across an unfamiliar desert without human guidance. One had its brake locked up in the starting area. Another began by throwing itself onto a wall. Another got tied up by bushes near the road after 1.9 miles.
国防高级研究计划局（DARPA）组织了这次比赛，以推动未来战场机器人车辆的开发。但这场被称为“大挑战”的比赛证明，在没有人的指导下，让汽车在陌生的沙漠中疾驰是多么困难。其中一辆车的刹车在起跑区锁死，另一辆一开始就把自己开到了墙上，还有一辆行驶1.9英里后被路边的灌木丛缠住了。

One turned upside down. One took off in entirely the wrong direction and had to be disabled by remote control. One went a little more than a mile and rushed into a fence; another managed to go for six miles but stuck on a rock. The "winner," if there was any, reached 7.8 miles before it ran into a long, narrow hole, and the front wheels caught fire. "You get a lot of respect for natural abilities of the living things," says Reinhold Behringer, who helped design two of the car-size vehicles for a company called Sci-Autonics. "Even ants can do all these tasks effortlessly. It's very hard for us to put these abilities into our machines."
一辆翻车，一辆方向完全错误，不得不遥控禁用，一辆行驶了一英里多一点，冲进了篱笆；另一辆行驶了六英里，被岩石卡住。“获胜者”（如果有的话）行驶了7.8英里，然后进入了一个又长又窄的洞，前轮着火。为一家名为Sci-Autonics的公司设计了两辆汽车大小的车辆的Reinhold Behringer说：“人们了解了大量生物的自然能力。即使蚂蚁也能毫不费力地完成所有这些任务，我们很难将这些能力应用到我们的机器中。

The robotic vehicles, though with necessary modern equipment such as advanced computers and GPS guidance, had trouble figuring out fast enough the blocks ahead that a two-year-old human recognizes immediately. Sure, that very young child, who has just only learned to walk, may not think to wipe apple juice off her face, but she already knows that when there's a cookie in the kitchen she has to climb up the table, and that when she gets to the cookie it will taste good. She is more advanced, even months old, than any machine humans have designed.
这些机器人车辆虽然配备了先进的计算机和GPS导航等必要的现代设备，但很难快速识别前方的街区，而这一个两岁的孩子马上就能认出。当然，那个刚刚学会走路的小孩可能不会想擦脸上的苹果汁，但她已经知道，厨房里有饼干时，她必须爬上桌子，当她吃到饼干时，味道会很好。她比人类设计的任何机器都先进，即使只有几个月大。