Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Robot Competition - I couldn't take it

So I took 40 seconds of video during a break, and here's that VIDEO REMIXED AS MY INTERPRETATION OF THE EVENT (Click here to watch the video).

...So I went to the MIT robot competition tonight. Lots of Bexley homies were competing. One of them, Orian made it to the final 2, and lost in an aggressive match. While I was watching the announcer talk, someone noticed my face was really red. It was true. I felt terrible. The language they were using was full of "hey little kid with the big head, get out of the way or we'll outsource you" and "we're training students to start their own companies or work for a company." Actually when the announcer said that I shouted out "what if they don't want to do either of those two?" First he pretended to be sappy and sympathetic, then he said, "seriously though, our design processes are just as useful if they want to go on to design financial algorithms and make money." I know it's silly, but the language is so loaded, and it reminds me of my former life in EECS. They even had 3 different kinds of balls that the robots could pick up: graduate, engineering, and humanities balls. The humanities balls were worth the least points (I'm not kidding these were the official names). So the competition was really fun, but I had a hard time listening to the language because of the point of view it represents.

By the way all the Bexley kids were awesome. Will had a wild robot that threw out an arm and slung sucked up all the balls immediately. Orian (from the video) scored the highest score of the night and took everything real slow and chilled.

No comments: