.. and while on nerdy topics - robot soccer

As some people know, I used to be involved in RoboCup, which is the world cup of robot soccer. It is made up of a few different leagues, but all involve fully autonomous robots playing soccer (i.e. no human control). I was involved for two years at Melbourne Uni in the four-legged robot league, and got to go to Seattle (USA), and Fukuoka (Japan) to compete. A friend of mine, Bron, who was also in the 2001 robocup team that went to Seattle, just sent me this link to some photo's and video's from this years robocup which was held in Osaka.

Australia has a great tradition in this tournament - in 2002, Australian Universities (including Melbourne) made up three of the top four positions. We lost in the semi-final to Carnegie Mellon University, who then went on to win. This year I believe the German team won, beating Newcastle Uni in the final. UNSW came third overall.

It is a pretty big event to say the least, especially in Japan - in 2002 I even found myself signing autographs (though admittedly, my fan base had an average age of about 8 years old, and seemed more interested in the kangaroo pictured on our team t-shirt than our teams performance) - however, it was great to find a place where being a geek was considered cool (or perhaps the attention was more because we were considered freaks) :)