Cibermouse @ RTSS 2008

Right now I’m still sleep deprived having only slept 3h30 – something that happened by accident. I’m also a bit angry because my entry got arbitrarily bumped out of 3rd place by the competition judges. That sucks. Not just for the cash (100 eur) but mostly because it feels like a slap to face. I worked for 1 week non-stop (close to 20h/day for 5 days) and came all the way to Barcelona. I watched with excitement as my agent did better than most in the competition even if it was partially luck (as was for the 2 teams with better scores). And after all the sacrifice, tears and joy I don’t get to go to the final because of an arbitrary decision of a group of people. FUCK THAT. That’s why I dislike the existence of judges in a competition such as this. “Fixing” scores is cheating – regardless of weather it’s done behind the scenes or in plain view. Sigh. I guess it was too much for the final round to be 2 Portuguese teams, 1 Italian and none from the USA.

And worse, both of the entries from FEUP were from undergrads who only had 1 week to work on this while many of the other teams were from people who had masters and phds and the italian guy that got 2nd place was an associate professor and had 1 month to work on it (and said he thought it wasn’t enough in his presentation).

Oh well. At least the team that won was from FEUP (Team SpeedyGonzales) and I’m happy for them (congratulations again Alvaro, Fabio and Sara). The other team from FEUP (NetSqueak) sorta gave up so they got merged into my team and presented their results during the first part of my team’s presentation even though their agent wasn’t running in the competition.

My presentation sucked! I fell a sleep and didn’t wake up till 5 min after the competition officially started. I managed to arrive on time and do a few slides but I was way too tired to make a decent presentation.

Since I only had one week to prepare for this (from scratch) that meant 1 day to write the paper, 5 days to write code and 1 day to travel. Unfortunately my initial approach which consisted of using neural networks for motor control was a huge fail and I wasted a day with it. Still, in 4 days I managed to get probabilistic mapping, basic communication, and a bunch of behaviors (though many buggy) written. Apart from what I learned about cibermouse and robotics there’s also the experience of having an even more insane deadline than usual. It’s very much like a real time system: if you cant do it in this amount of time, it’s a fail. You have to give up on certain solutions if they don’t work because you can’t predict how much time it’s going to take you to get it to work while it’s a lot easier to estimate how long it’s going to take to implement a different solution (if you’ve done something similar before).

Honestly, a few minutes before the competition I thought I was going to be the worst entry there. There were so many bugs that remained unfixed that I had to disable a lot of my mouse’s intelligence – hell, during the first run, 2 of my agents crashed and I had to further cripple it by disabling the comunication system for the second run or risk losing points again (crashed agents collide with walls). Most of the entries had no intelligence anyway – at least not in practice. I was expecting to see some really intelligent agents but instead, the ones that did better where the ones closer to plain simple reactive. In fact, the robot that won the thing for SpeedyGonzales was a purely reactive agent (they had two wall followers, two explores and 1 simple reactive agent). Building intelligence into robots is a lot more complicated than I believed it to be. Also why the hell did so few of the entries bother to actually use the damn sensors properly to avoid collisions? Makes no sense.

I spent the past few hours at the hardrock cafe which is pretty much next door (like 30s walk) to the hotel I’m staying at. I liked it, the only other I had been to was the one in Oslo and that one was a HUGE FAIL – when I went there, it didn’t have Rock (they were wacthing football) or “Cafe” (coffee), the machine was broken or something. I was told the one in Lisbon was Bigger & Better (TM) than this one so I’ll have to check it out next time I’m in Lisbon. In the meantime I’m tempted to purchase a tshirt or something.

For the next 2 days I’ll get to see Barcelona (so far I’ve been stuck at the hotel working). So I