Bold, virtual race of skeletons

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers at Stanford University are hosting a competition of computer-generated skeletons in a virtual race, as a crowdsourcing effort to gain better models of the bone, muscles and nerves that may help doctors manage movement disorders like cerebral palsy.

Sixty-three teams have submitted 145 ideas to the competition, one of five similar contests created for the Neural Information Processing Systems conference scheduled for early December in Long Beach, Southern California.

Lukasz Kidzinski, a postdoctoral fellow in bioengineering at Stanford supplies each team with computer models of the human body and the virtual world that the body must navigate, including stairs, slippery surfaces and more.