Wednesday August 30th We had good news this morning when Sony distributed their decision on the 'ball-holding' discussion of yesterday. The compromise that was adopted was that if the action ever occurs, then the referee will count three seconds, and after that the robot will be penalised. We reckon this is a fair compromise. We really didn't want it outlawed completely, as we feel that it will be valuable for passing in the future. Sony also said that the normal rules of the competition don't apply in the Robocup Challenge, and that the team is free to tackle the challenge any way they like. The first match today was between Sweden and Tokyo. Tokyo needed to win the match to have a chance of making the quarter finals. In the end they won it 4-2. Sweden didn't appear to be playing as well as in their previous match, and the Tokyo head swing was quite effective. The Tokyo team 'kick' the ball by knocking it sideways with their head. Tokyo were still having troubles seeing and reacting to the ball, as the Tokyo goalkeeper let a ball sit on the goal line for a while because it couldn't see the ball. This let the Swedish attackers have a clean shot at making the goal. Tokyo winning this match made it 3 points apiece in Pool A, and so a countback on goals was needed. Both Sweden and Tokyo had 5 goals for, and Osaka only had 2 goals for, and so Osaka was eliminated. Figuring out first place for Pool A again involved a goal countback. Sweden and Tokyo each had the same number of for and against goals. So because Tokyo beat Sweden in their match, Tokyo came first in Pool A. Next up it was Rome and Pennsylvania fighting each other for a place in the quarter finals. Rome was very good at being able to see the ball, and had a couple of cool kicks they could do in different situations. A problem with the Penn robots was that they took too long to make a decision about what to do with the ball. Several times a Penn robot had the ball, but when it tried to localise itself it was taking too long, and the Rome strikers were able to close in on it and block it. Rome won the match 3-0, so they progressed to the quarter finals, and Penn were eliminated from the competition. Everyone was pleased to see Essex able to field a team for the next match. The Essex programmers were still in Essex, so their team leader borrowed someone from the simulator league to help with placing the robots. Since neither of them had done any programming with the robots, they were unable to make any changes to the code. This meant that their goalie was still working with the old penalty area, and not the new extended one. A consequence of this was that the ball got stuck in the corner a lot. The goalie could see it, but refused to do anything about it. McGill were also having lots of trouble actually seeing the ball, and after the match was stuck with the ball in the corner for several minutes the referee called a restart. Things didn't improve, and the match ended in a nil all draw, and so we saw the penalty kick for the first time in Robocup 2000. McGill kicked first and scored within the time limit. Essex looked like they were about to score, but they mishandled the ball, and ran out of time while making another attempt. So after putting up a fight, Essex didn't end up making the quarter finals. The last match of the day was another in which the winner would get through to the quarters. Melbourne/RMIT played Humboldt, and thought that they might be able to make a decent game of it. Humboldt scored in the first half, but only after play had moved up and down the field a couple of times. We also saw the 'holding' rule come into play for the first time ever, when one of the robots fell on top of the ball, and it was trapped underneath. During the half-time break, Melb/RMIT were confident that they could even the score in the second half, and started talking about penalty kicks. Unfortunately, even though they had a really good chance of making a goal they couldn't convert it, and so Humboldt made it through to the quarter finals. Tomorrow is a rest day, because the new field is being set up. The quarters, semis and finals will be played on the new field, and the Robocup Challenge and the 3rd place playoff will happen on the current field. Darren, Son and Bernhard have been working hard on their Challenge code, and are investigating using the infra-red range finder on the robot to avoid the obstacles in Challenge 3.

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