Friday 18th

A good nights sleep, and an exciting trip into the Expo Centre on the
bus provided. (Traffic laws seem to be pretty optional in Shuzou.) I
get into the Expo Centre around 9, to find that Julian and Jie have
both been there some time, having important matches to play today.
Jie has a 9.30 deadline to prepare his next 3D team, and so he is
unusually able to wander around the Hall for a while having done that.
Then the matches are played out on the big screen; we are in a `hard'
group for this part of the contest and end up losing more than we win,
which puts us into 3rd place in our group, and out of the rest of the
contest. Nonetheless, a wonderful performance to get to this point in
our first year of play in this league.

Next up is Julian. There are a number of competitions within Robot
Rescue, and what Julian has to do here is essentially to drive a
number of virtual robots around a virtual disaster area, exploring as
much of the area as possible and finding casulties. The programming
side to this is largely to automate some of the robots' controls in
clever ways, and to make the information coming back from the robots
as clear as possible to him so that he can proceed as quickly and
accurately as possible. (It's amost like trying to drive 3 or so cars
at once, by engaging the cruise controls on them in turn.) It's early
days for this league and the new software available means that Julian
is finding bugs that are causing him problems. (It's never clear
whose bugs.) These carry on into his go at mapping the latest
disaster area for the competition, and so he's disappointed to end up
in 7th place overall after that ends. (But he will get a go at
another task tomorrow.

Meanwhile I've been contacted by Daniel Polani, who is from the
University of Hertfordshire and has been coming to RoboCup for some
time. He wants to set up a UK committee to promote RoboCup back home,
and having shown enthusiasm for this I find myself in a committee
meeting for a couple of hours, where the new British group is welcomed
into the international RoboCup family. RoboCup is run by a large
group of volunteers, some of whom take care of the details at
individual RoboCup events, and some of whom have a longer-term
involvement. At the top of the tree are the Trustees - around 16 from
all over the world and each with 10 years plus involvement in RoboCup.
Then there are the country representatives - we've just elected Kate
Sim from the Open University as ours; she does sterling work with the
Junior Leagues. Then there are a multitude of Technical Committees,
that decide the way that each league should evolve, and a few more
Committees for good measure. Another thing that has just happened i
tha Jie has been voted onto the Technical Committee for 3D simulation
- a great honour, and a promise of much work!

After that Jie discovers that his 2D team - which has had a rest day
today - is next drawn for tomorrow against the favourite to win the
overall competition. So he and Julian both decide that they must make
further changes to their code before their next crucial matches. I
finally manage to find ime to go to listen to a few technical talks in
the RoboCup Symposium, which is happening next door, and get some
dinner before the 3 of us head back to the apartment, a little earlier
than previous nights. The guys are still adjusting their code late
into the night though.