2002 Finals

Urban Challenge National Championships

And the $50,000 winner is …
Marcy and John Beard of Austin, Texas! The Beards (Team Vignette #1) were winners of our Dallas race. They say the money will come in handy as they are moving to France.

Into the Labyrinth
The finals began as finalists loaded into the Urban Challenge mystery van at Paris Resort, and were driven to the "labyrinth," a suburban maze miles from the Strip.

The 15-question Trivia Challenge was shown from a tv in the trunk of a car, and teams were released individually according to their score every two and a half minutes. The Labyrinth clues and location was designed to minimize reliance on ground support (they simply weren't there)

Teams had two bus lines, Tropicana and Flamingo, to get back to Las Vegas proper from. Although each line ran every twenty minutes, they were on alternating schedules so there was a bus leaving the eastern edge of the labyrinth every 10 minutes. The eastbound Tropicana line, additionally, ran through the middle of the labyrinth. From the Yahoo! Urban Challenge group:

Terrence Lee (Team Oozing Monkeys):
The finals were really hard. They ended up driving way out to a residential area west of the strip. The maps we had with us, did not show any street details out that far and I know at least one other team had the same problem. Fortunately, my 2 sisters who were our internet people did have good maps for that area. The first 4 clues ended up being little puzzles to come up with different intersections. The clues themselves were not that difficult, but the area we were in was dubbed "The Labyrinth" be the UC organizers for good reason. It was a total maze of streets, with the high concrete walls around all the yards adding to the complexity of navigating around.

David Olds (Team Fluffy Bunny):
For the finals they took away our cell phones at Paris when we got into the van that was transporting us to the start. We did not know where we were going, and they did not want us informing groud support people who could follow us there.
   We did not get our phones back until we were given our clue tube to start the finals race after the trivia. It worked pretty well, as we were all, I believe, forced to find the first four checkpoints without any ground support.
   They also had a UC person following each team in a car for the first four or five checkpoints.
  The hardest part about the first four clues was the maze of streets. Most of the streets curved, and very few were through streets, so navigating involved a lot of running 200 meters turning right then an immediate left then another left, then stop and check the map to realize that you should have gone right, left, right. The intersections were easy to find on a good map, but you couldn't get to any as the crow flies. Very different from the strip.

UNLV and the Strip»