Re: [robocup-rescue-s] 2007 Competition Comments (until now)

Hi,

There are some points about the maps of preliminary competitions adding to
what Mr. Boorghani said.

We had 11 random maps out of 24 maps which is used for preliminary, which is
about half of all maps, I want to know what is the purpose of such a map
designing?! as far as I know there are two views in RCRS first is we want a
simulation which is most close to the real environment, for overcoming the
crisis after an earthquake, if we consider so, which controlling
groups/systems knows nothing before the first minute of a disaster and
begins its work just after 3 minutes of knowing the city they are working
on!
Another view is that it should be a test bed for applying methods, which
helps to produce/improve some AI/CS methods, in this case, I think current
definition and evaluation system of RCRSS has enough randomness (e.g.
finding civilians about to die in first cycles, finding easy to extiguish
fire sources, ...) if we add to them a random gis in this large scale I want
to know what is to be tested on these methods?!
I think the only reasonable purpose of Random map is to prevent
just-hardcoded-implementations (which is reasonable somehow in real world),
but not in about half of scenarios.
I know it is not against the published rules of RCRS, but please let me know
the reason behind it.

The other point is why a random map should not have any limitations? let me
explain it more by an example of today's first random map(Random 7) on our
team. We have worked on an estimation method which predicts the time of
traversing a specific route, me and my teammates had a long discussion on
maximum size of a "shortest-path" route, the best we could do to avoid the
memory exceeding was to find the maximum possible shortest-path route on all
the random and non-random maps and scaling it as large as possible, in the
Random-7 map our estimator faced with a strange map which has two many
disconnections in routes so that a shortest-path route from a corner to the
opposite corner contains most of the nodes in the map.
Again, I know it is not against the rules but by the current rules I can
design a random map which cause teams' codes to got so many different errors
or at least -if they have handled the errors- most of their methods would
not be tested.

At last, I know designing situations and scenarios is really hard, I know
you are much busy there because of bad management and lack of facilities in
Robocup 2007 (as far as I have experienced during registration), but I think
it is more difficult for you Cameron, because you didn't have an alive team
on RCRS for about three years.

However, I appreciate your efforts on RCRS while it has no benefits for you
personally, but I think these In-My-Opinion careless decisions is
disappointing everyone about this field in Robocup event.

Regards,

On 7/6/07, Ahmad Boorghany <boorghany_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> You know this is the third day of RoboCup2007 competitions holding in
> Atlanta. First I want to appreciate committee members which do their best to
> have a good competition here, then I want to make some comments about the
> competition and games.
>
> - You know since the second day games result are not uploading on the wiki
> page (because technical problems, it seems) and also there is no other way
> to obtain the results until the end of the round, if you want to know the
> scores you should sit down in front of screens and wait for the game to
> finish. It is difficult so teams can not evaluate their situation during
> running of the games. I just want to ask from the committee to solve this
> problem by fixing wiki page online updating or writing scores after each
> game somewhere ( e.g. a board).
>
> - My second comment is about the maps used these days. I think these maps
> do not have required variety to evaluate team's behavior. You can
> categorized most maps in 2 groups which has too many similarities. for
> example:
> 1) maps with many fires (not controllable fires - huge portion of city
> burns for all teams) and too many blockades (whole map seems blocked).
> 2) maps with some small fires (which most teams extinguish it easily)
> and there are no considerable blocks.
>
> However there are some exceptions but anyone views the logs can sense this
> lack of variety.
>
>
> I hope that the committee takes care of these for coming rounds.
>
> Regards,
> Ahmad.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> robocup-rescue-s mailing list
> robocup-rescue-s_at_cc.gatech.edu
> https://lists.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/robocup-rescue-s
>
>

-- 
Hossein Azizpour,
Robotics Research Center,
Amirkabir University of Technology,

_______________________________________________
robocup-rescue-s mailing list
robocup-rescue-s_at_cc.gatech.edu
https://lists.cc.gatech.edu/mailman/listinfo/robocup-rescue-s
Received on Fri 06 Jul 2007 - 20:40:45 GMT