Friday September 1st The good news this morning is that the vision problem of last night had been fixed. Son took some extra pictures this morning that helped the learning algorithm learn to correctly classify the colors. This was a big relief to the team. Today was also the day that the quarter finals started. From this point in, it is a knockout competition, so it is really important to win the matches. The first match was Tokyo vs Rome. For some reason during the game, the Tokyo strikers insisted on knocking the ball in the wrong direction. Because of this, the Tokyo goalie was under continuous pressure, and it let through two goals. One of the goals was scored by Tokyo's own defender, who hit the ball the wrong way. Rome have earned their place in the semi-finals, and it is a real achievement for a first year team to do this. The next quarter final was LRP vs McGill. No one really gave McGill a chance, expecting the 1999 champions to win easily. However, the play in the first half had everyone doubting. McGill scored their first goal in Robocup, and then another one to lead 2-1 at the break. The French team were visibly sweating, as an ecstatic McGill celebrated. The second half saw a determined comeback from LRP, and they scored the equaliser in the first minute. After that McGill didn't get another chance, and LRP came out winners 4 goals to 2. Although the scoreline doesn't suggest it, McGill came very close to pulling off a major upset. UNSW played the third quarter final against Humboldt. When Helmut of the Humboldt team was asked how he expected the match to go, he said that keeping UNSW to single figures, or scoring a goal of their own would be all they would want. He was to be denied on both counts, as UNSW won the match 11-0. The match was not without incident, with Humboldt kicking the ball out of the field twice. Another problem that the UNSW team noted during the match was with the response to the Humboldt kick-off strategy. The ball always landed in such a way that the goalie could see the ball, but its legs got stuck in the goal, and it could not get to it. This really slowed the game down, and UNSW probably could have scored more goals had they been able to effectively respond to the situation. After a team meeting this afternoon, strategies to combat this were devised. The last quarter final match was between Sweden and CMU. Sweden looked quite strong coming into the match, and another upset was on the cards. Sweden had several scoring opportunities in the first half, but were unable to convert them, while CMU only had a couple, but converted one to lead 1-0 at half time. After that, the second half was all CMU. The Swedish robots appeared to have trouble recognising the ball, and this was probably their undoing. CMU ended up winning the match 4-0.

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