Tuesday August 29th Today's first match was an all-Japanese affair when Tokyo took on Osaka. The Tokyo team was popular with all the school children watching, mainly because Tokyo's leader gave a good explanation of how his team worked. Even with thirty Melbourne school kiddies cheering Tokyo on, they still lost 2-0 to Osaka. So if Tokyo beat Sweden tomorrow, Pool A will be tied at up one win each, and deciding who goes through to the quarters will go on the goal count of each team. Should be interesting. The next match was LRP vs Rome. This was the first time a new team had played a match, and so we wanted to see how much Rome had been able to accomplish. We were very impressed that they were able to see the ball quite well. As with last year, the French walking proved to be to their advantage, and they scored three goals against Rome. LRP are now definitely through to the quarter finals. The next match was supposed to be UNSW vs Essex, but as explained on yesterday's page Essex had to forfeit. Yesterday Sony asked UNSW if they could play a demonstration match, and the team eagerly agreed. The team borrowed two robots from Essex, and Sony provided four more, and so UNSW fielded a team against itself. This was actually quite important for the team's tactical planning, because they had never been able to play a full match against themselves before. There would also be the chance to settle some intra-team rivalries, as strikers developed by individual members would have a chance to play in a real game. The first half of the match was played with four competition strikers, and two competition goalies. No experimental code was tested in this half, as the team wanted to observe the behaviours of the robots when faced with an equally skillful team. The neither team was able to run rampant the way the UNSW robots had done in previous matches, as both sides were (obviously) more equally balanced. The half-time score of 3-2 showed the evenness. It was interesting for the members of last year's team to watch that half. The flow of play was similar to that from last year, in that there were a lot more scuffles for the ball than there had been in other matches this year. In the second half, the team fielded a team of competition robots, and one experimental team. The competition goalie was used on both teams though. The experimental teams had two strikers, one called Genghis Khan, and one called Cheetah. Genghis was written by Darren, and its mode of attack was exclusively headbutting the ball. Cheetah was written by Bernhard, and the way it worked was by turning around the ball, and then using the two-legged UNSW kick. The two competition strikers were called Terminators, for obvious reasons :) Bernhard commentated on the match, and was fortunate to have one side of the arena full of school children in blue uniforms, and one side in red uniforms, so each team had a cheer squad. Unfortunately for the red school kids, the blue team ran in three goals to nil in the second half. Fortunately for the UNSW team, the red robots were the Terminators, and the blue team were Cheetah and Genghis, so it showed that the Terminators were better in attack than the more experimental methods. Today also saw the other Australian team of Melbourne/RMIT play their first match, which was against CMU. Melb/RMIT weren't quite ready with their goalie, and so it spent the match sitting in front of the goals switched off. Their robots were able to see the ball, but didn't seem to be able to coordinate their legs to position themselves correctly. CMU's goalie appeared to have localisation problems, as it kept walking into the goal, but it wasn't too much of a problem, as the CMU strikers were able to run in 8 goals to 0. After the day's competition, a couple of teams raised concerns about the method of play used by Cheetah in the demo match, calling it holding the ball. After lots of discussion and examination of video replays, Sony asked for submissions from all the teams asking for their opinions. Sony will make a ruling tomorrow morning, so we'll wait until then. The team went to a noodle bar on Swanston St for dinner. We discussed our strategies for the next couple of days.

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