From a curious alum, and excuse the inside baseball: Long ago, there used to be a 6.270 contest. I noticed this is a 6.370 contest. Anyone know the history if they're related?
Similarly, 6.186 (better known now as MASLab) was also inspired by 6.270, but diverged in the opposite direction: more ambitious physical designs (no legos), more computational capacity, richer sensors (it's mostly vision-based), etc.
The three competitions span a pretty nice continuum.
Thanks to all the answers in this subthread for the current info.
The memory is the first thing to go, etc etc.
EDIT: It was indeed robots from the beginning (1987). http://perspective.mit.edu/about/history.shtml