Another weekend of buggy is in the books! This one is a little late because we wanted to bring you all of the qualification details- read on to find out! There was also a unique buggy from Fringe –> See more in our galleries, we had many alumni out reporting! This is your last full report of the semester, as next week’s will be short as we prepare the members-only Raceday preview.
As anyone familiar with Buggy knows, the BAA is constantly looking for opportunities to better connect students, alumni, and the wider community with the sport that we all love. For example, this year the BAA has worked to improve our support for new teams by refreshing the buggy build book, expanded our history database with race details from the 1980s and 1990s, and started to provide limited video coverage of freeroll practices.
With that in mind, we wanted to find a new way for fans of the sport to engage with the vast collection of knowledge that is contained in the BAA community. As many Carnegie Mellon students and alumni know, AI is proving to be a technology that is allowing people to learn things that just a few years ago they would have never believed to be true.
Of course, we already have experience in the BAA with Artificial Intelligence through our raceday predictions provided by MechaJockey. However, we wanted to find a way for the greater community to actively engage with our data and alumni experience from the last hundred years. MechaJockey is not efficient enough to run full time interactively (and besides, who knows what MechaJockey might do to us meatbags). Thus we needed to develop a new, vibrant, and ovine-forward approach. A chatbot was really the only possible answer to meet these needs.
With that in mind, we herded multiple departments at the university including the CS department, Computing Services, and Landscaping to shepherd the necessary skills to bring such an experience to life. Together, this group of experts have developed a new form of LLM that we call the neural flock (paper to be published later this year in the respected journal “Colamborations of the ACM”).
Thus, today we are pleased to announce SchenleyAI, available for public use on our discord. As an early beta, SchenleyAI is able to answer simple yes or no questions. It has been extensively trained on all of our most active discord discussions, as well as the older forum archives, history data, photos, rolls reports, and miscellaneous other buggy content we have at our disposal. As it happens, the insights provided by our most vocal alumni proved to be the key to bring this vast knowledge together.
Today’s release is the beginning — a beta test capable of responding to your yes or no questions about buggy (we’re keeping it simple, as things always have a risk of going wrong with new Buggy Software). You can try it today in any of our public discord channels. Simply preface your question with ‘$schenley‘. For example:
Our experiences so far have been Not Baaaaaad, but we look forward to seeing what everyone else can bleat out of it. We can hardly imagine all the new concepts that AI will bring to our favorite sport. Log into our discord and give it a try today!
Update: We would like to thank everyone for participating in our initial test of SchenleyAI. However, upon reflection, training on the chats of the most vocal and opinionated alumni might not have been the best plan, and we have discontinued the service and placed SchenleyAI into a virtual field where he can frolic and graze to his heart’s content.
We have one more weekend before its Truck Weekend, folks! We’re seeing more and more teams qualifying their drivers. Meanwhile, we have some late additions to the field, with SAE showing up for their first weekend of rolls this year. This week, we also have another video report from Rob, available here. In the reports leading up to Raceday, we’ll now be Highlighting any buggies that are qualified to race! Carryover rules have changed, so please bear with us as we try to crunch the numbers correctly…
Welcome back from Spring Break, buggy fans! James here, filling in while Dan has escaped to warmer (and likely less gusty weather). Despite the strong winds here in Pittsburgh, it seems the course was spared from road hazards and we got 2 full days on the course.
We also got our first look at the new buggies debuting this year! Highlighted in the table below:
Hello BAA members and buggy fans! Raceday is quickly approaching. As usual, we can’t do all our good work without your help. Though last year’s Raceday was a strange one, the shared effort of this community made it so much better than it could ever have been without. So, we ask you once again to volunteer your efforts. There are three main roles we need covered:
People to staff the BAA tent, who will dispense schedules, spotters guides, and information to fans new and old
People to help in the official timing booth, transcribing race times into our live-updating table as each race ends
People to participate on-screen in the broadcast booth, alongside the illustrious Will Weiner, other familiar beloved characters, and maybe Connor too.
You’ll see in the sign-up sheets that you can volunteer to help on specific segments of the weekend, so you can stay free for any other times. The more volunteers we get, the less weight any one person has to carry, so please encourage your friends to sign up too!
The Spring 2026 Buggy Enhancement Grant application will remain open through raceday 2026. After you submit your application, expect an email from the committee the following week with questions and concerns that they would like to see addressed. Once you have responded to the committee’s feedback, we’ll hold the final vote on your grant proposal.
Keeping grant applications open throughout the fall allowed us to better serve the buggy community by engaging with students closer to the moment of inspiration for their proposal. This doubled the number of projects that the committee was able to consider last semester. Please note that proposals for larger dollar amounts may be asked to wait until the start of the next semester so that other projects can be considered along side them.
Thank you for all of our Golden Goose Lifetime Members who have made this program possible. If you would like to support this program, a contribution of $1,000 to the Buggy Endowed Fund will earn you a Golden Goose Lifetime Membership to the BAA. These funds are invested by the university, and the return on that investment perpetually funds the Buggy Enhancement Grant program, making the sport safer, faster, and more fun for all who enjoy it for many years to come!
Yes, buggy is back! A foot and a half of snow a few weeks ago almost derailed us for the entire month of February, but a few warm days last week and some serious snow moving cleared the way for rolls. Read on for some more details on the orgs that braved the below 25 windchill to get their drivers practice this weekend. Also, your first video rolls report of the year is here! (Thanks, Rob!) The BAA is always working on new ways to offer buggy content, so let us know in the comments if you liked the video!
Submissions are due at midnight this Saturday, the 31st. The committee will meet next week for the initial discussion and voting, and applicants will have 7 days to respond to the committee’s feedback before final voting.
We have $15,000 available for this round of funding! This money belongs to you as a member of the buggy community to enhance your enjoyment of the sport. If you have an idea to make the sport safer, faster, or more fun, we want to hear from you!
Proposals can be specific to your team. Please include some details on how the community as a whole will benefit from funding your project. For example, you might share documentation of your process, publish a video, or give a talk about your findings. You might build something to collect better data during rolls, test out a new material, or build something to make your chores easier.
For more information on the grant program, including previously approved grant applications, materials and findings from previously approved grants, how to spend your grant money, and more, please read All About Buggy Enhancement Grants.
Welcome back! It is time to submit your ideas for Buggy Enhancement Grants for the spring semester! If you have ideas that you think will enhance your buggy experience, we want to hear from you!
Submissions are due by January 31st, and will be reviewed by the committee the following week. Applicants will have 1 week to respond to the committee’s feedback before the final voting.
Proposals can be specific to your team. Please include some details on how the community as a whole will benefit from funding your project. For example, you might share documentation of your process, publish a video, or give a talk about your findings. You might build something to collect better data during rolls, test out a new material, or build something to make your chores easier.
Last semester, $7,370 was awarded to grant recipients, a new record! Every project that applied during the initial campaign was fully funded. We kept applications open for the full semester, which allowed us to fund and additional 3 projects!
For more information on the grant program, including previously approved grant applications, materials and findings from previously approved grants, how to spend your grant money, and more, please read All About Buggy Enhancement Grants.
Usually, we get to see a couple more days of rolls after Mini-Raceday, before winter sets in. That was not to be this year, as consistent rain hit the course the following two weekends. So, while you haven’t heard from me in a few weeks, I wanted to give you all one more report! This will be a Fall Rolls-In-Review post, where we will go through some stats & storylines from the semester.
And highlight photos, too!
Org
Buggy (number of Fall rolls, excluding Mini-Raceday)
Apex
Helios (39), Solaris (32), Molotov (20), Scorch (21)
