ROBOT WARS

22:16

Or, Why I Wanted To Be An Engineer:

In my youth, I saw an MIT engineering competition on TV. One of the first ones I saw involved two robots, two pegs, and one peg-sized hole in the center of a table. The object was to make sure that it was your peg that went in the hole. This is starting to sound like a clumsy double entendre, but at the time I only had eyes for the robots. I saw two other MIT engineering things, both involving ping pong balls, much later in life. That was what made me decide I wanted to go to college. I didn't know what it was called, the class that produced these grinning. plotting, tool-and-die artificers with the intense looks. I just knew that I wanted to do that.

Several years later, I read about something called Survival Research Labs on an Amiga Bulletin Board. Twilight Zone, it might have been. It was said to involve battling robots. This attracted my interest like a rare earth magnet. SRL turned out to be more performance art than engineering, but was still pretty neat. Like monster trucks are to others, I suppose. I built a couple of robots in Eletronics at school, but all they did was not crash into things and make strange, oddly evocative meeping noises.

Well. It turns out you don't have to go to MIT to compete in a thinking tank battle. There's Robot Wars. This year, there is no Robot Wars, but there was something else in its place, Robotica. It was somehow stopped by evil lawyers, and all the robot builders are pretty pissed off. Now, if I were a lawyer, I'd certainly think twice about simultaneously pissing off and freeing a bunch of time for people who have built robots that can punch holes through inch thick metal plates. Especially if, as a result, the robots will no longer be destroying each other. In any case, there won't be anything to read about this year, most likely. Last year's event is chronicled by Andrew Lindsey on his team's website.

Bought a bed. Yaaay. Should be delivered the day after my DSL gets installed. I guess now would be a good time to clean up my room. My house is a good example of the tendency of nerd lairs to be either meticulously tidy, or an awful mess. My room is the awful mess. Ed's is meticulously tidy. Go ahead and try to leave a cardboard box in the living room for ten minutes. All I can say is, it's hard to build a robot in your room without making a mess.


From the Really Big Chainsaw Department.