First day in MIT

I think I am really nervous because of my studies. For the last 3 weeks, I have woken up at 4.20am, but have fortunately been able to fall asleep again. But today I woke up a 3.20am, and could not fall tightly asleep anymore. Instead, I saw some rather worrying nightmares about studying. Strange. But now I just have to dress up (casually, tomorrow I need to wear a suit, hmm, and I do not really know how to tie the tieknot..), go out and walk to MIT. The weather should be nice, clear skies, some 5 degree centigrade. It wil be late before I am back at home. It will be long day, we need to staart our first design contest, which is going to a small robot made out of Legos. Have a nice day! And take care!

First day in MIT

The first day in MIT is now over, but work is not. I still has to learn to the NQC programming language for Lego Mindworks. We must design and implement a simple robot with the Lego-system. The robot must then face head-on other similar robots in a sumo-type tournament. Rather fun, but there is some work to do before the robot is ready to fight. Means spending a few long evenings in MIT.

The first day was mostly introductory. First the director Pat Hale introduced the program contents and goal (after, of course, Ted Hoppe had introduced etc everything in his characteristic and enthusiastic style). Then we, the 62 students in this SDM05 class, of which 6 are woman, introduced ourselves. There are students from (at least) USA, UK, Germany, Greece, Turkey, China, India, Taiwan, Pakistan, Poland, Canada, and maybe somewhere else. Most students have been doing rather complex systems, but I did find it conforting/surprising/strange, that there were really few who would have experience of systems of similar complexity and size as I do. It seems that the "200 million euro" education I got in Nokia (using the expression of Reijo Koivula) pays off rather well, if not for Nokia but at least for me. And it seems that no other has travelled in more than 45 countries and that nobody has more than 5 patents (as I do). So, maybe I do not have to continue waking up at 4 am due to nervousness. That said, I am confident that the others have a lot of experiences, ideas, and point of view, which are new for me and from which I can learn quite much. And as many other said, it is a realization of a longtime dream to be studying in MIT. It will not hurt, at least.

I walked both ways. It is really nice to walk to MIT and back, it keeps me from losing my composure totally.

But now I have to read and learn the NQC. It is not that hard thing to do. It is basicly a limited set of C with some predefined macros for getting the values of sensors and for controlling the motors (both of which there are only 3 pieces).

Well, it seems that programming in NQC is a piece of cake. The difficult thing is to decide what to program: how the robot is going to find the other robot, how it will either destroy the opponent or push it from the playground (and realize that it has done so), and how it find its way back to the starting point. I have some ideas already, but I will not write them here just in case anyone from the other 9 teams would be reading this. Basicly, the thing should be somewhat simple, but, at the end of the day, luck has a lot to do with this: one only has one touch sensor, so if one will hit the other robot when moving in the wrong direction, one does not realise it (except that one could, I guess, use the rotation sensort to realize that one has hit something). Or one could have a rotating arm with the touch sensor. Or whatever. It is time to get some sleep.

Still another note. I find it really nice to work with a group with a design task when everyone is excited about what we are doing and we can communnicate even late in the night via email etc. It has been a while since I have been doing any real design. The last time was in China in April 2004. Of course, this little robot is nothing compared to real life embedded real-time systems, but the design process is more or less the same. Maybe one could use something like this for distilling some essential truths. I do not know. But however it may be, this is going to be fun and life is good when one has fun - and product development is much more fun than doing drugs. Really! Try both if you do not believe me. But of course product development and drugs together, well, that is even more fun. Sad that the US government is waging its insane, braindead, and unsuccesfull and unnecessary war on drugs (as well as on terrorism). The war of drugs is actually a war on happiness, as is the war on terrorism, too, but this has quite a little to do with designing robots. Or does it? Anyway, neither of the wars is not going to make US, not to speak of the rest of the world any safer. At least if making the world/US safer means doing something to recude the amount of avoidable premature deaths as much as possible with the given amount of money.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs January 2005".