gwax's rumblings

I’ve been stress­ing out about my the­sis lately, namely inso­far as it not get­ting fin­ished and that I’ve been blow­ing off time that I should have spent work­ing on it but it turns out that it’s not hard to write when I actu­ally do so. I’ve spent the past 3.5 hours hun­kered down in my room and I’ve churned out 7 pages of pretty decent stuff. If I can get myself to do this in the future, every­thing will get fin­ished might fast and I can get back to slack­ing with­out stress.

The next thing that I really need to do is add some equa­tions and dia­grams to help make sense of some of what I’ve writ­ten. I also need to go do some research to get some ref­er­ences and a whole bunch of back­ground material.

As great as pro­cras­ti­nat­ing is, now is just not the time for it anymore.

It appears to be the case that CalTech is tak­ing up a prank­ing war against MIT. This reminds me of the var­i­ous col­lege rival­ries that I am aware of: CalTech has a rivalry with MIT, MIT has a rivalry with Harvard, Harvard has a rivalry with Yale and Yale has a rivalry with Harvard. Save for the Harvard/Yale rivalry, these rival­ries are one sided and the tar­get gen­er­ally doesn’t care about the insti­ga­tor. As far as I know, Harvard thinks they’re bet­ter than MIT and doesn’t care enough to bother with us and the same is true for us and CalTech.

I’m speak­ing largely from my own expe­ri­ence and it may very well be the case that CalTech may be able to inspire some MIT stu­dents to react and the rivalry may become two sided. Personally, I find it rather child­ish but I am still mildly curi­ous to see what will hap­pen with this whole affair.

I took me some GREs today; they weren’t too bad, but they were pretty annoy­ing. It took all this time and stuff. The pos­i­tive aspects of tak­ing the GRE today is that I can go in and talk to my advi­sor and see if he thinks my scores are good enough to apply to grad schools or if I should go take some­thing again; I really don’t want to take them again, it’s expen­sive and annoy­ing. The neat part about the new com­puter based test­ing is that they give you results for Verbal and Quantitative as soon as you fin­ish. Not going to post my scores because this isn’t high school any­more but I will say that I was pleased with my Quantitative score and have mixed feel­ings about my Verbal score.

GRE be done (as long as my advi­sor agrees). George out.

It is now offi­cially the begin­ning of the end, today was the first day of the first term of my last year as an under­grad­u­ate at MIT. It’s kind of funny; wasn’t long ago that I got here and it was even more recent that they handed us our Brass Rats. It’s kind of funny how fast time flies. At this rate, I’ll be get­ting my Ph.D. before I know what’s happening.

For those of you look­ing to find me dur­ing the day, my new office is now in 7-100LA. I will be adopt­ing an open door pol­icy whereby any­one can step in and visit if they would like to talk or need any­thing. I will be in my office dur­ing the week when I am not busy with prior engagements.

I hope the move poses no incon­ve­niences for anyone.

It’s exactly one week into term today and, some­how, I am already com­pletely swamped. I even dropped two classes today. No time to blog more than that. Back to work.

You might be ask­ing your­self why I’m awake at this hideous time of day; heck, I might be ask­ing myself the very same ques­tion. Unfortunately, I know what the answer to the ques­tion is: class. I have an 8:30a class on Tuesdays and Thursdays this term. The prob­lem of course is that I have to go to sleep at like 10:00p on Mondays and Wednesdays but the upside is that I don’t have any­thing on Friday or in the morn­ing on Monday and Wednesday.

I guess the truth of the mat­ter is that it’s really early, I don’t have any­thing to say and I don’t want to fol­low the pre­vi­ous entry with a long pause because, despite the ironic humor, I don’t want to be that guy.

Tomorrow (today after I wake up) is reg­is­tra­tion day and then spring term classes begin Tuesday. I can’t really say how I feel about the whole new term thing; I have mixed feel­ings. On one hand, I would like to get back to learn­ing new stuff, being active and fol­low­ing a set sched­ule, but on the other hand, I know that there will be a lot of work involved.

The goal for this term is to try to have classes only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, giv­ing me four day week­ends and Wednesday off. I’m not cer­tain if it is pos­si­ble, but I’m pretty sure that it is. The only prob­lem is that it cur­rently looks like I’ll end up with classes from 8:30a to 5p, which is irri­tat­ing but won’t be too bad if it’s only twice a week. If I do get most of the week off, I’ll have to fig­ure out how I want to arrange the rest of things; do I work a lot of desk, or go out and do things, or do my home­work, or do other work, or just sit around? This will all be deter­mined later if I can pull off the two day week.

Then, of course, I will have to go and deal with one of the worst things asso­ci­ated with the begin­ning of term, fig­ur­ing out my text­book sit­u­a­tion and how much money I’m going to end up shelling out.

Oh well, it’ll be nice doing some more learning.

6.270 has come and gone now. We didn’t win; in fact, we didn’t come any­where near win­ning. On the other hand, we did have a really good time. If it weren’t for the lack of prizes and campus-wide recog­ni­tion, I’d say it was bet­ter this way. That hav­ing been said, I’m more than plenty happy.

6.270 qual­i­fiers and seed­ing rounds are today and impound is Wednesday. Our robot is very much not ready to actu­ally com­pete but we only need to score a few points in order to qual­ify and be allowed in the actual com­pe­ti­tion. I’m con­fi­dent that we can score enough points to qual­ify, though we will likely seed poorly (not that it really mat­ters). After that’s out of the way, it should prob­a­bly take us a few an hour or so of ded­i­cated work to get the robot com­pe­ti­tion ready (by which I mean capa­ble of win­ning). We should be plenty ready in time for impound.

All in all, despite the fact that both Muth and I have pretty much taken IAP off, I am still con­fi­dent that we’ve got this thing fig­ured out. More 6.270 news when we’re com­pe­ti­tion ready.

Right now there’s this Mystery Hunt thing going on in my dorm and other MIT related places. Basically, it’s this huge puz­zle con­test of sorts. This year, once again, I have decided not to take a hugely active role in the mat­ter and have just taken a con­sult­ing sort of approach to the whole thing. As it stands, I have con­sulted on two prob­lems both of which have been solved whilst I was help­ing. The first one was some­thing involv­ing some organic mol­e­cules and what­not; other peo­ple did the grunt work and I helped with some of the end bits and get­ting the solu­tion. The sec­ond one was this really neat symmetry/crystallography one which I got involved with when some­one said, “Hey George, we have a prob­lem that we think is crys­tal­log­ra­phy, help us.” Now, on this puz­zle, I was there pretty much from start to fin­ish (minus sleep and some other things) and I played a pretty piv­otal role in solv­ing all parts of it. After all, I do know my crys­tal­log­ra­phy. Incidentally, we were the first team to solve the symmetry/crystallography puz­zle and the orga­niz­ers expect that we may be the only team that will solve it.

w00t!

Muth and I are work­ing on this 6.270 robot of ours and get­ting good results. Mind you we’re not work­ing on our com­pe­ti­tion robot yet, just one to com­plete the var­i­ous assign­ments for the class before we can start work­ing on our real robot. This being totally unim­por­tant quality-wise, we’ve been shoot­ing for just enough effort to get things checked off and move on. Assignment 3 was due yes­ter­day and Assignment 4 today; these are the only assign­ments that involve our pre-competition robot.

Assignment 3 invovled build­ing a robot that can go for­ward, back­ward, turn counter-clockwise and respond to a bump sen­sor. Yesterday we spent 2 hours build­ing a robot that sat­is­fied the require­ments for Assignment 3 and most of the time was spent debug­ging code only to find out that I had for­got­ten how to tell the dif­fer­ence between left and right. Having fin­ished, we walked into lab and were checked off in about 10 minutes.

Assignment 4 is where the story gets fun. Assignment 4 was to make your robot chase after an IR Beacon. We start out oday with some mod­i­fi­ca­tions to our robot from yes­ter­day, namely mount­ing the IR Beacon and fig­ur­ing out how to make it work (which is pretty hard because it’s sup­posed to be con­nected to the expan­sion board, which we aren’t using). So we ended up putting about 1.5 hours of work into the thing (of which a por­tion was taken up by my mak­ing and eat­ing some mac­a­roni and cheese). We didn’t test the robot before going into lab and my expec­ta­tion was that it would be suf­fi­cient, but barely so, to pass check­off. So we go in to lab and I’m think­ing that I should prob­a­bly test the IR recog­ni­tion capa­bil­i­ties of the robot before we ask to be checked off (don’t want to waste TA time after all), but then I fig­ure that I don’t really care and it should work so I don’t bother. We’re stand­ing there wait­ing to get our hands on another IR Beacon so that we can try our robot and in the mean­while we watch a num­ber of other teams make robots that sit there and twitch a bit, maybe twitch­ing gen­er­ally towards the IR Beacon and so on. We get tired of wait­ing so we ask if we can just get checked off then (with­out both­er­ing to test) and our robot races after the Beacon so fast that the guy can’t get away from it fast enough. The thing is flaw­less, and the TA made the remark that, “That’s the way it’s sup­posed to work.” So basi­cally, with a total of maybe 3.5 hours of work Muth and I have man­aged to make one of the best robots for Assignment 4.

Muth and I pwnz

So, I’m doing this here 6.270 — Autonomous Robot Design Competition as my thing this IAP. To sum it up in a brief lit­tle chunk, basi­cally, a lot of peo­ple make some robots out of Lego and con­trol them using these Handyboard things, which are just fancy lit­tle con­trol boards that let you make sim­ple robots. All of the robots (60 teams worth) will then be pit­ted against each other in a set of qual­i­fy­ing rounds and then a big dou­ble elim­i­na­tion competition.

Now, that the cur­sory expla­na­tion for those out of the loop is done, some other details. My team con­sists of myself and that Muth kid. Muth’s a good kid; I like him and I think that we’ll man­age to do pretty damned well with this com­pe­ti­tion thing. We’ve already fig­ured out our strat­egy for try­ing to win and it seems pretty solid and more impor­tantly, sim­ple. Since we’ve got a good hold on what we’re going to be doing and how we’re going to do it, we’ve taken up being a bit arro­gant, but I think that it’s not totally unfounded. Following are some of the amus­ing things that exem­plify this arrogance:

• Planning to be done 1 – 2 weeks before the competition
• Planning to sit around get­ting wasted while every­one is fran­ti­cally try­ing to make theirs work when the dead­line is upon them
• Fielding a placebo robot for qualifiers
• Naming our robot “# Awesome”, where # is the num­ber of points that we will be earn­ing in every round.
• Not using the extra batteries
• Not using the expan­sion board

Anyway, the list con­tin­ues, but the basic point is that we think that we’ve got this com­pe­ti­tion in the bag and we’re going to be jack­asses about it. It will be pretty damned fun to be bet­ter than the rest of MIT and lord it over them. Admittedly, if we fuck up, then we’re just a pair of idiot jerks, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.