We spoke yesterday about how the Robotics Team completed their competition vehicle early enough to do extensive testing, and that was certainly the case. You'd think that weeks or months of testing would result in a competition-ready robot, but we are only two hours before the competition ends and Aluminator is still not behaving properly. The S&T crew just came back from the test track where the 'bot simply turned in circles. When pressed for an explanation the team admitted that the AI system had been properly tested on a simulation program that, uh, wasn't the same software program
used on the actual robot. To make matters worse, the student who wrote and tested the program wasn't able to attend the IGVC so our code-writers are desperately trying to develop "work arounds". They still hold out hope that they'll qualify by the "skin of their teeth" and get a run at the competition course but even if Aluminator gets a good run today we won't know the final event standings until some days or weeks later.
Stay tuned for late reports.
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