Sumo Loser

My robot doing what it does best: running away.

For the last couple of days I've been working away on my Sumo robot. I got the kit on Monday and tonight we had the finals. The robots are really neat. You can program them using C# and they are powered by the rinky dink .NET Micro Framework. I wasn't sure about winning on the performance front, so I thought I'd go for style. A moving graphical display looked like it might hit the spot and so I got one and strapped it on the top of my competitor.

Turned out that style was the only point on which I had any chance of scoring. In the competition my robot did something that it had never done in the many seconds of intensive testing that I did before the event. It developed a taste for just piling out of the circle as quickly as possible. Perhaps it was obeying some higher "survival" programming which I was unaware of. At any rate it meant that for me, the game was over very quickly. It is perhaps just as well, some of the competitors looked to be deeply scary, pouncing on their prey and forcing them out of the ring.

The good news is that I got together with a bunch of fellow "second placers" and we set up a kind of "off piste" fighting arena where we just turned them loose. This was great fun to watch, even though my robot never actually won anything, it did manage to lose with a certain style…..

Robot Brawling

The Hand of Fate

I've always found probability interesting. Last week in the paper someone was writing about the way that things always even out, but over the very long run. You would expect that if you toss a coin 100 times you would get 50 heads and 50 tails but apparently this is very unlikely to be the case. In fact, you could find that you get many more heads than tails. And yet, just because you've had more tails this does not meant that the next toss is more likely to be heads (because it is "their turn") or tails (because they are popular at the moment).

I've been thinking about this and it makes a kind of sense. If you could use the fact that there have been 50 heads and 49 tails to predict that the 100^th coin toss will definitely produce a tail then the coin toss is not random, and therefore something is wrong with fate. I even got to thinking that some part of the universe keeps track of the ups and downs of randomness and makes sure that things level out over the long run. Actually, this is unlikely to be the case, in that what is really going on is that stuff is just happening, and we are trying to draw conclusions from what we see. At the moment I'm in Las Vegas, a town built on probability, and it is interesting to see that all the roulette wheels have displays which show the most recent results to "help" the player decide which number is going to turn up next. As if.

Anyhoo, I got an even bigger does of probability today when I picked up a raffle ticket for a prize draw at one of the events here. I loudly told everyone around me that I might as well tear the ticket up right now because I never, ever win raffles. A fact that struck me as particularly unfair as the prize was a pretty good one – a shiny mobile phone. Of course, I ended up winning. The only snag is that the phone doesn’t actually work properly back home in England, but there is always ebay……

Rob Speaks

Do you have those "What on earth am I doing here?" or "How did I get into this?" kind of moments very often. I don't have too many and fortunately, being of a literal frame of mind, I can usually answer the questions with "Giving a talk" and "Via the lobby". I had one of those today though, just before I gave my presentation. I've met people who say airily "Oh, I never get nervous before I give a talk". Well I do. I regard it as part of the preparation process. I reckon that a certain amount of concern about the way that things are going to turn out does tend to improve the final product. When I fly home on Friday I want the pilot to be fretting to some degree about the success of the take off and landing parts.

So there's nothing wrong with getting nervous, although I have found that if you turn into a quivering wreck on stage this can cause the audience to lose some of their respect for you. I reckon the key to nailing presentation nerves is preparation. If you have confidence in your knowledge of what you are going to speak about, have tested all the props and demos, and have contingency plans if they don't work, then you can just get on and do the job. So, after some pacing of the stage, the appointed time comes and off we go. And just about everything works. And the audience seem to like it. And I finish on time (always a plan if yours is a session immediately before lunch). And they even clapped at one point. Thanks folks.

MEDC 2006 Gets Going

Went to the keynote of MEDC 2006 today. The first thing that caught my eye was the way that Platform Builder has now been tied very neatly into Visual Studio 2005. Platform Builder is the tool that you use to buld platforms (well - duh). More specifically, it lets you create a custom version of Windows CE for the particular target device. You use it to select which features (Media Player, Compact Framework etc etc) and it then builds the stuff that you put into your device to make it work. Previously this has been a slightly mysterious affair, with strange incantations and tools being required. But now it is looking a lot simpler with a new project option for studio (is there nothing this tool can't do) that does most of the grunt work and some very nice editing tools to help you with the rest of the job.

Startup Slide

Then it was on to a demonstration of how easy it is to build embedded systems these days, with a Point of Sale cash till being created on the fly out of various components. The next thing they mentioned was pure music to my ears. The .NET Micro Framework was announced. This is not going to be micro. Quite the reverse. It is a continuation of a development which started a couple of years ago, when a small company took the technology that makes the Spot watch work and then deployed it as a general purpose controller that you could program in C#. At the time I got very excited about this technology, but they unfortunately it all went quiet. But now it is back with a whack and Microsoft properly behind it. They were even giving away robots powered by .NET micro (I managed to get one and it will be taking part in the robot sumo competition on Wed. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, this technology is going to be very big indeed and will be super for teaching.

Camera's eye view of the keynote

After that, the stuff about the new Mobile Patterns and Practices was a little less exciting, but it is none the less very useful. One of the things that it provides is a set of libraries which allow you to create completely different layouts for different screen sizes and orientations. These are selected automatically as required, and should mean the end of things on the screen getting into a mess when you change the orienation of your device from landscape to portait.

My robot, ready for action.

Getting Started at MEDC 2006

Today I got my conference bag. One of my rituals is to empty it out and see what swag I've got.

Not bad. Of course only a really sad person would post a picture of their entry badge as well...

Now promise that you won't copy it and take over my identity.

In 'Vegas even the lifts have chandeliers in them.

I'm not sure if they had one of these in Venice. But they have one here.

At the end of this beautiful corridor there are some slot machines. A lot of slot machines.

A view of my hotel from the walkway.

The only way to get in or out this hotel is via the moving stairway. Apparently this broke down last month and twenty people were trapped on it for two days. (I have used this gag before, but I still like it).

I got this lovely sumo kit. You get to make a .NET Embedded controlled robot, which you can program in C#. Wonderful. On Wed. we get to make them fight each other. But first I have to build it.

I'm doing session 2. Scary eh? More tomorrow.