For the second year in a row, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (TBC) will be hosting the Not-A-Boring Competition.
The event challenges teams to design and build a tunneling machine that can “beat the snail.”
In the inaugural competition last year, TBC was seeking ways to improve the speed of the company’s underground boring machines, which Musk has jokingly said move 14 times slower than a snail (hence the tagline and company mascot – Gary the snail).
The same challenge lies ahead of this year’s participants, but as explained on the competition website, there are a few “twists and turns.”
This year, the teams will compete in four categories, including who can build the most accurate tunnel and who can dig the tightest turn.
Like last year, the tunnel must have a length of 30m and functional cross-sectional area of at least 0.2 sqaure metres, or the equivalent of a circle with a 0.5 meter diameter.
Interested teams can apply here, and must be able to answer the following question:
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The 2021 Not-A-Boring Competition saw over 400 applicants, with twelve teams advancing through the technical design reviews to advance to the final stage.
In the end, a group of hobbyists from the United Kingdom (UK) who called their creation “Biggus Diggus” came out on top, beating eleven other teams from university’s and institutes from around the world.
