Sunday August 27th We had a league meeting this morning to have the rules explained to us. It took much longer than it was supposed to, but everything seems to be clearer to everyone now. The pools were also drawn, and these are the results : Pool A Osaka University University of Pennsylvania Tokyo University Pool B LRP Team Sweden University of Rome Pool C UNSW McGill University University of Essex Pool D Carnegie Mellon University Humboldt University University of Melbourne/RMIT The pools were drawn by first randomly placing the top four teams from last year (LRP, UNSW, CMU and Osaka) into seperate pools. The remaining five teams from last year were distributed among the pools, and the three new teams (Rome, Essex and Melbourne/RMIT) were put into seperate pools. We also played some practice matches today. These are so the teams can test their calibrations, and also so the new rules can be tested as well. One new rule that has been introduced is the extending of the penalty area. This is intended to reduce the amount of scuffles in the corner that occurred so often last year. You can look at the results of the matches here. During our match, which we played against CMU, the word went out among the other leagues that something special was happening at the Sony Legged League arena. By the end of the match the arena was packed with people from all the other leagues who had stopped their own development and come to watch. UNSW won the match 12-0, which is far and away the largest winning margin ever in the Legged League (although this is only a practice match). Son, Darren and Bernhard have been putting in tremendous amounts of work into the team this year, and that was really evident today. UNSW started the match with only two robots, because one refused to boot up, but was replaced halfway through the first half. It was immediately obvious that the UNSW robots really knew what they were doing, as they quickly and accurately scored goal after goal. Of course, even with that gob-smacking display of ball-control and walking skills, the team could still see things that needed work. After a pleasant dinner in Lygon St, the team is back and hard at work. Today also saw the arrival of more friends from Stockholm. Ken and Yuko, who will again be doing pictures and text for the official Sony website are back this year. It's hard to believe it was a whole year since we were in Sweden.

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