Yay, Magic Smoke!

Now it's really over. The final competition was today, with two rounds in the morning to weed out the weakest robots, and then the finals in the evening. Surprisingly enough, we won our first two matches! The first one was a total fluke - our claw wasn't attached to the servo (oops!) so the robot couldn't wall-follow and got stuck on the edge of the table. But we hit one ball hard enough in the process that it wandered into the 1-point goal. And since the other robot deployed the wrong way and had the point-blocker fall off the table, thereby scoring nothing, we won! Man, we were just really lucky there. The second round was much better - we reattached the claw and the robot worked just the way it was supposed to. We scored 14 points by transporting seven balls into the 2-point zone. The other team didn't score anything, so we won. That meant that we were guaranteed to play in the evening rounds and be on TV and everything. Exciting!! (Unfortunately, Amy, Sarah and Brett's team didn't make it on to the finals because their robot kept false starting. It's a crying shame though, because it seemed to work quite well.)

The evening rounds were even better. There was a big audience, and it was really cool to have all these people yelling "Magic Smoke!!!" I've never experienced that first-hand. ^_^; We did great in the the first two matches. The first round, we scored 18 points. I think it was the highest amount scored by any of the robots in the first round (certainly the highest out of the mid-ranked robots). The next round, we scored 21 points. A personal best for Magic Smoke. :P Thing is, 13 of the points from those two rounds were scored by the other teams. Haha, oh well. Whatever works. Unfortunately, in the next round, Jon made a calibration error and our robot failed to start, so it lost. It would have been an easy win too, since the other team only scored 7 points. Jon was really beating himself up over that one, but he shouldn't have - none of us had expected to do so well. The round after that, we scored 11 points (Magic Smoke was starting to drive erratically by then) and the other team beat us out. So that was it - it was a double-elimination tournament. We were out. But it was great to stay and watch the rest of the tournament. The two best robots finished with a best 2 out of 3 match, and Team 28 won - they had an interesting ball-scoring-preventor device. All in all, it was a great tournament, and I was really glad that we'd participated in it. All that hard work and frustration really paid off! Oh, and once we all get our websites finished, I'll post a link to the site so you can see what everyone spent the past month working on...

Now I'm all ready and excited to start the next semester. Finally, I'll be taking Computer Science classes again, woohoo! And I've definitely got two classes that don't have finals, and a strong possibility of a third that doesn't have one either. So that means that I'll probably only have one or two finals, depending on whether I drop a class or not. So far, I'm planning on taking 6.004 (Computation Structures - required CS class - it's reputed to be fun, but there's a new lecturer this term... This is the class where it's uncertain as to whether we have a final or not), 6.170 (Software design lab - another fun class, but a major time sink), Japanese II (Woohoo! I'm looking forward to this!), 5.12 (Organic Chemistry - needed for a bio minor), and 18.06 (Linear Algebra). I might end up dropping 5.12 or 18.06 because taking five classes is practically suicide, especially if one of them is 6.170. It's uncertain right now... I ought to see what my advisor thinks. Hah. Like he'd know anything about it.

- Flykyr Skysong

Current song: PERSONA 2 Eternal Punishment OST - BGM II (original name, huh?)
Current mood: ^_____^