TMFBT: As for example, the winner of the second military robot car event was a low hardware, very high software, automobile. Second place was the high hardware component, low software component vehicle.

That was the spin that the NOVA documentary put on it, but that spin is pretty much bogus.

First of all I'm pretty sure that not one person on the Carnegie-Mellon team would ever have claimed that software wasn't important or that hardware was more important than software.

Conversely the supposedly "low hardware" Stanford team's vehicle was running with a rack of seven computers and an inertial navigation system out of a fricking spacecraft.

And when they faced off again in the third robot car event, CMU was declared the winner and Stanford finished second. So do we conclude that hardware is more important than software now? Or did the teams change philosophies between the second event and the third event? I don't think so; I think the dichotomy used to give a "theme" to the NOVA episode was oversimplified to begin with.