Re: [robocup-rescue-s] Complaint: Reply from Technical Committee

Dear Cameron,

I would like to pose a couple of question on your email. I was not aware
that the temperature of the building will now be revealed to the agents.
This could help a lot the strategy of the fire brigades in a lot of ways.
Your announcement was as follows:

> 3) The next version (0.49.6) which is due to be released soon contains
> one additional building property: building temperature. This is a
> discretised value taken directly from the fire simulator. Teams are free
> to ignore this property if they wish.

I was wondering:
1) if the next version will be the one used in the competition this June in
Germany
2) if the exact temperature from the firesimulator will be announced (or at
least a rounded one - like the hit points of civilians are announced)

Thank you for taking the time to respond to these questions,
Ioannis.

Quoting Cameron Skinner <cam@cs.auckland.ac.nz>:

> To all Robocuppers,
>
> The changes to the kernel and simulators made in 2006 have been almost
> entirely for purposes of stability and reliability. There are a small
> number of exceptions which are detailed below:
>
> 1) HP and damage rounding. This feature was introduced on 31/1/06 in
> version 0.49alpha to prevent teams from having a perfect "estimation" of
> the state of a civilian. In 2005 it was noted that at least one team
> stopped rescuing civilians when they had determined that no more
> civilians would die. This is a totally unrealistic situation. In a real
> environment it is not possible to *completely* determine the state of
> any object in the world.
>
> To make the simulation more realistic it was decided that rounding the
> HP/DAMAGE values sent to agents would make it difficult to determine the
> exact state of a civilian, as would be the case in real life.
>
> It is the opinion of the technical committee that this change is not a
> major one and teams should not be significantly disadvantaged by this
> change.
>
> The committee also notes that this feature was released 5 months before
> the competition. We feel that this is sufficient time for teams to adapt
> to the new environment.
>
> 2) Randomised fuel loads and fuel consumption. Similar to the rounded
> hp/damage, this feature was introduced to make it more difficult to
> determine the state of the fire simulator. It changes the fire simulator
> from a completely deterministic process to a stochastic one. Again, the
> technical committee notes that this is more realistic and that the
> change is minor and should not significantly disadvantage any teams.
>
> 3) The next version (0.49.6) which is due to be released soon contains
> one additional building property: building temperature. This is a
> discretised value taken directly from the fire simulator. Teams are free
> to ignore this property if they wish.
>
> The technical committee wishes to stress that this feature does *not*
> affect the way any of the simulators function. It will not affect the
> fire model, nor will it affect any of the other data sent to agents.
> This extra property provides some additional information that teams may
> or may not find useful.
>
> 4) The remaining changes in the 0.49.x release series are all bug fixes
> or architecture changes. The only significant change that will affect
> teams is the communication protocol change. The technical committee
> estimates that it would take at most 5 hours work for teams to modify
> their communication libraries to work with the 0.49.x architecture. The
> librescue and rescuecore libraries provide reference implementations of
> the protocol in C++ and java respectively.
>
>
> You can see that there are really only three changes that affect teams.
> These changes are all minor and are aimed at enhancing the realism of
> the simulation and at making the simulation software more stable.
>
> *There will be no more functional changes to the kernel or simulators
> before the 2006 competition.* Bug fixes will still be made and further
> releases beyond 0.49.6 are possible if major bugs are discovered.
>
> The technical committee's goal is to run a fair, open and interesting
> competition and to work towards the Simulation League goal of eventually
> performing *real* urban search and rescue missions. The changes that
> have been made in 2006 are aimed at achieving these goals.
>
> Finally, the committee notes that the 0.49.x series of releases have
> been available since 31/1/06. Teams have been notified of each release
> and asked to test each version. To date, 6 bugs have been reported since
> 31/1/06.
>
> Teams should be aware that the version used at the 2006 competition will
> be from the 0.49.x release series and *will* use the new communication
> protocols. It is the responsibility of teams to ensure that their agents
> work with this version of the kernel.
>
> Regards,
> The Technical Committee.
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Received on Thu May 11 04:15:43 2006