David's diary

2007 Engineering Tripos Part IIB (Information and Computer Engineering)
Synoptic paper

1. (Machine Learning) Consider the task of training a neural network to answer Tripos questions on Machine Learning. If only a single "sample exam paper", which may or may not reflect the content of the exam, is available (due to this being the first year the subject has been offered), describe the dangers of overfitting and whether any prediction can be made about the performance of the trained system on the actual task.

2. (Computer graphics) Define the term rasterisation, by analogy with a hungry student methodically scraping the last spoonful of ice cream from the bottom of a container.

3. (Computer vision) In stereo vision we attempt to reconstruct the world from a pair of images. Which of the following pairs would produce the best results?

i. The view from the top of Great St Mary's, and a depiction of particle traces in a bubble chamber
ii. A portrait of Queen Victoria, and a photomicrograph of a flea
iii. The Earth from space, and the first fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls
iv. The Eiffel Tower, and a single soap bubble

Give a mathematical justification for your choice.

4. (Robust and optimal control) Using the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations, derive an optimal plan for a final-year engineering undergraduate trying to decide what to do with the rest of their life.

5. (Computational systems biology) Define the terms paralogy, orthology and xenology. If a set of lecture notes contains slides that have diverged from a common ancestor; slides that were modelled on those through which the lecturer was made aware of the concept; and slides that were borrowed from other lectures, discuss which of the above terms apply.

6. (Nonlinear and predictive control) If a Part IIB Engineering module is modelled as a vector in a D-dimensional space, prove that no eight of such modules can form a linearly independent set. Show also that the gradient of knowledge must be locally Lipschitz on x.

(The official colours of MIT.)

Well, here I am, halfway through my last night in the USA, with everything done except for the last entry about MIT I am determined to write before I leave!

For the record, I am arriving back in the UK at 7.40pm tomorrow/today; I am then going up to Scotland with my father, but I will be getting to Cambridge in the early evening of Sunday 18th June in time for May Week and, specifically, Trinity College May Ball on the Monday evening. I will be staying until the 30th (and will be taking part in the graduation festivities), and then going back to Scotland to help my parents move all our things from Surrey to somewhere near St Andrews. I will also be beginning work on my final-year project: building a hovering model rocket (more information), which should be fun .

This semester has been, again, good - although still a lot of work. The courses I did were:

• 6.034 - an introductory artificial intelligence class, involving programming in an intriguing language called Scheme. Some fairly extensive design projects ensued!


• 6.141 - Robotics: Science and Systems I, a hands-on (death-by-)robotics course. Fun, and I was in a group with some very good fellow students, but some of the weekly labs took 24 hours! Some photos of our robot and its builders.


• 16.30 - control theory for aerospace engineers, which I took because of schedule clashes with the corresponding EECS class. (Interesting comparison: aerospace at Cambridge seems mostly about jet engines and wing designs, whereas at MIT it's all about systems integration with a healthy software engineering component!)


• 2.011 - the freshman introductory ocean engineering class, which I took because my UROP has engendered in me an interest in working on robot submarines... Although we didn't get quite that far, we did build and (successfully!) test quite a cool Remote Operated Vehicle.

Gratifyingly, I did quite well in all of them...

As for other activities, I have been continuing with my UROP working on the robot submarine in the Distributed Robotics Lab and eventually had a camera/laser rangefinder that works well most of the time and gives more-or-less accurate results. I managed to get not just one but two trips to Roatan, Honduras, out of the project - they were quite hard work, but part of the work was snorkelling for a couple of hours per day "to test the electronics". (The rest of it, however, was merely sitting in the house coding...)

I also took sailing lessons with Lawrence on the river Charles (in dinghies that were, of course, designed by MIT), and acted as an Ear for pikans to talk to if they felt the need. And I spent a long weekend in Pittsburgh, visiting Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, and touristed around New York and Washington DC last week after all the exams were over and done with.

It feels strange to be coming home now, though; I know some things have changed in my absence, but about other things I'm not so sure. It's not quite the same as coming back from Australia - there I felt I was always a visitor, whereas I've been at MIT long enough and made friends with enough people to feel as if I have been a part of it and will miss being here. It is still the case, though, that almost all my possessions on this side of the Atlantic are sitting in a couple of suitcases in the middle of my room, and early tomorrow morning they and I together will leave this continent behind...

Speaking of which, I should get some sleep before then. Goodnight!

Despite its being somewhere north of two months since I updated, I assure you I am still all right .

A lot of things have happened in the meantime, though, so I beg your patience if you want to read through all of them (in roughly chronological order).

Excursion to Plymouth: On the 11th November MIT gave us a long weekend for "Veteran's Day", and I decided to take myself off to Plymouth, MA - by myself through (semi-deliberately, it must be said) failing to find anyone else who wanted to/could come. I had to leave fairly early in the morning in order to catch the (1 hour Commuter Rail) train from South Station, but the weather was splendid and I had a nice walk around the town (photos) (it was the first colony founded by the British in North America, stepping out of the Mayflower onto the Plymouth Rock in 1620). The best thing, though, was to get away from everything MIT-related for a day; quite remarkably liberating and cathartic. I should explore more ends-of-commuter-lines before I leave - once the weather improves!

Microsoft Puzzle Challenge: The following day from 12pm to 12am I took part in the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge, "Wonders of the World", with three other Course 6 CMEers (Brendan, Mark and John). (I should mention at this point that in this context "puzzle" can mean any form of task - mathematical, logical, general knowledge, mechanical - which gives a word as an answer, although it is probably not very obvious even what the question is!) We were very much the newcomers - MIT is famous for its puzzle competitions, especially the annual Mystery Hunt which finished at 4 this morning (!), and we had never done anything like this before - but nonetheless we managed a very respectable 8 puzzles out of 21 (which would have made us the university champions had we been at the University of Southern California...). Needless to say, it was an MIT team that won overall (the prize was a new XBox 360 each, not that I would have wanted one anyway!). It was an interesting experience, though we (and the room we occupied) were feeling a little worn out by the end... A welcome relief about halfway through was afforded by MITHenge, the spectacle of the sun shining all the way along the Infinite Corridor, and although I was slightly underwhelmed it still seemed fairly popular.

Thanksgiving: This year the American holiday of Thanksgiving, commemorating a local tribe throwing a banquet for the Pilgrim Fathers at the beginning of a harsh winter, fell on the 24th November. It is the equivalent of Christmas in Britain: almost everyone went home to their families (I was asked by one pikan how my family celebrated Thanksgiving...), but kindly some of the members of WILG cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for, among others, us CMEers. I baked a fruitcake for the occasion, before being informed that in America fruitcakes are a standing joke for something that no-one really wants...

Montreal: For the rest of the Thanksgiving long weekend, the inimitable SJ had organised a two-night trip to Montreal in Quebec, Canada, for 20-odd of us CMEers; her professional demeanor only slipped when the Canadian customs official took exception to being photographed... We road-tripped up there in a minibus, spent two nights in a youth hostel, ate in Ben's Diner, visited the Cathedral, attempted to walk to the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome (a.k.a. the Biosphere) (before we discovered it was rather further than I had thought), admired the exceedingly improbable-looking 1976 Olympic Stadium and enjoyed playing in the snow . Remarkably, crossing the border on the way back was fairly straightforward - we even encountered an immigration official with a sense of humour (!).

pika's non-denominational holiday shrub: From surfeit of better things to do at the end of the semester I accompanied some of the pikans on the traditional trip to Quincy Market to buy such an item of vegetation to decorate the Murph - largely in a capacity of unofficial photographer. A nice touch, I thought, was that on the way back we walked and carolled our way along the Infinite Corridor, up the Student Centre lift and around the W20-575 Athena cluster to disturb all the people busily tooling for the end of term. Most enjoyable!

End of classes: To top it all, my term ended fairly successfully academically too. In 6.004, I successfully built a working microprocessor at the gate level; my 6.111 project, the LED cube, not only worked but was finished ahead of schedule, leaving us plenty of time to write the final report; I... managed to reach the end of 6.241, though my understanding rather tailed off in the last couple of weeks; and 14.12 came to a more-or-less satisfactory end (although Prof Yildiz, as a souvenir, booked us a lecture theatre for the final exam that would have been too small to accommodate everyone in the class even if every seat had been used!). Somehow or other I managed to get As in all of them, too! (It is also possibly worth mentioning that the concept of "state transition diagram" managed to make an appearance in all of the above, even the economics class...)

...And home: After my solitary final exam (in 14.12), I flew back to Britain for the holiday. In total I was in England for 4 days - entailing a haircut, a visit from Helen, lunch with most of my maternal relatives and my paternal grandparents, Christmas Day with my family and Boxing Day packing - before we flew to Kenya for two weeks of holiday. The four-day safari in the Tsavo and Amboseli National Parks was quite incredible, in terms of the number and variety of animals we saw (almost all the classic megafauna except rhinos and leopards, plus 73 types of birds at least); I decided to let my father do the photography, with his combination of zoom lenses that adds up to a 1m focal length equivalent, so I don't have any pictures myself. We got to see some of the microfauna as well (in the case of ticks and mosquitoes, at rather too close quarters!), and went snorkelling in Watamu twice to glimpse umpteen varieties of tropical fish (including, apparently, mudskippers which I missed ). Under 24 hours to turn around before flying back to Boston was just barely enough, in much the same way as the two-and-a-half weeks I had away from MIT wasn't...

Jottings on a piece of paper from the middle of last semester

Things about myself that (I have noticed) have changed:

• I am less perfectionist than I used to be - I am no longer physically unable to hand in work which I could have improved given more time, because often there isn't;


• The last vestiges of my taboo against going to sleep after midnight are long gone;


• Caffeine addiction [I dispute this, but it's true the day now doesn't feel right unless breakfast entails a cup of (some sort of) tea]
  

And some observations to try to carry across the atmosphere of this place:

• MIT has as much IP-address-space as China;


• MIT students rarely reply to a lecturer ("for fear of being wrong and looking unintelligent", I was told) - it is noticeable, in classes where there are CMEers, how many of the questions are answered in English accents!


• A friend of mine opined that having a girlfriend was "the equivalent of at least two extra classes";


• People use their screennames as their nicknames, not vice versa;


• People just work here [sometimes, at least - though I'm sure a part of it is "reverse coolness"]

It's easy, far too easy, here to forget how one's actions affect and are reiprocally determined by others albeit geographically separated; in the season of Hallowe'en, spooky action at a distance, if you will. Today I received a parcel from the Other, Original Cambridge, opened past 1am, and not less appropriate because of it. Not only a card from the sender and orchestrator (yes, I can believe that that is what is happening! I haven't caught them at it yet, though) but also written enclosures from four other distinct hands, authentic European theobromine confectionery and a magic tree. I feel at once quite feted and ashamed, of course, that I have been quite so significantly amiss in keeping up with those that wish to know. Thank you, thank you...

To that end, in an approximation of news:
It snowed last weekend (! - and is now perfectly sunny).
Giving in to popular demand, I dressed as Harry Potter for Halloween and then spent the evening doing a 6.004 lab. I was quite pleased with the wand, though - home-made out of a branch, some wire and a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories light-up blue LED pen.
I went to a Halloween Iron Pour at MassArt on Sunday evening.
I am in the throes of midterms - 68% in the 6.241 24 hour take-home quiz (but apparently that's not that bad, despite the fact that someone got 110%...) and I had the 6.111 exam this evening. Now all I need to do is propose a 6.111 project and build a microprocessor next week, and I'll be fine...

Goodnight!

Hmm; for the first time in an indeterminate number of weeks (7.5 total, 6 of classes), I have actually been in the position of having not too much to do. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, I have completed this week's labs for 6.004 and 6.111 (a picture of the excitingly expensive hardware we are using for the latter); just had a mid-term exam for 14.12 (more ...challenging than I hoped, though I think (touch wood) that everyone else found it that hard too); and just handed in a pset for 6.241. It's been an odd feeling of relief from pressure, and as a consequence I have not known what to do with myself this evening. Not that I haven't had plenty of things to do when I had a spare moment, but now that I have some spare moments I can't tell what's the best thing to do with them.

Ah well; I spent the time productively, backing up my computer (last night it gave me quite a fright by playing some exciting tunes on its hard drive and then suffering blue-screen-of-death - it seems still to be working, but I'm still a tad on edge...) and listening to some ...interesting discussions in the Murph (in the bath!). This was after two separate helpings of free Toscanini's ice cream (one from the CME office, one from a pika alum) as well as the academic events detailed above; quite a busy day!

What happened in the last week? Quite a lot of work, again, and another 10 hours of UROP (my microcontroller now talks to other chips via the SPI interface, but I'm still working on the I²C part; I was very pleased, though, to be told by the grad student supervising me that I was "the fastest UROP [he'd] ever had" ). Also a lot of rain (the weather here suddenly became autumnal after weeks of brilliant sunshine, though the sun returned a little today), a trip to see the new Wallace and Gromit film (in the rain) (highly recommended!) and a visit to the MIT-area electronics Swapfest, where (among other things) I bought myself a DataRover 840 PDA from 1998 for $10. Somewhat antiquated, I know, but it should be fun to play with - and apparently someone has written drivers for it to be able to use a WiFi PCMCIA card with its built-in email client and web browser...

Anyway, I leave you with something else I finally wrote down this evening but have been thinking about for several weeks now, since the resonance first struck me:

(to the tune of Cat Stevens' "Matthew and Son")

Up till two, a P-set's due,
But just one more question - or maybe 2.

Watch them run down to Building 1
And a 9am lecture: 6.001.

MI of T, it's the place to be, there's always something new.
The work's in your head, you don't go to bed, you're never ever through.
And you've been working all night, all night, all night!

There's a five minute break and that's all you take,
For a can of Red Bull to keep yourself awake.

MI of T, it's the place to be, there's always something new.
The work's in your head, you don't go to bed, you're never ever through.
And you've been working all night, all night, all night!

There are grads who've been tooling for five or six years
No one asks for more credit 'cos nobody dares
Even though they're working harder, they never get Chairs!

MI of T, MI of T, MI of T, MI of T,
And you've been working all night, all night, all night!

And whoosh! Nearly four weeks have gone by since I last wrote anything here, yet it hardly feels like any time at all has passed. But simultaneously, like in its transatlantic namesake, each day contains far more than four and twenty hours' worth of minutes; things just happen here.

Thank you to everyone who has been sending me emails wishing me well for the year; I apologise for completely failing to reply to (almost) all of them... I hope all is well with you, and that you have a good year as well. I am also

I think I'm beginning to get into the MIT swing of things - "getting hosed" is the local term - having been working in the 6.111 lab until almost midnight for three nights last week, trying to get a traffic light controller to work on a $4000 field programmable gate array chip (about 20 of which had been donated to MIT by the manufacturer). It did, eventually! Other classes are going well albeit busily, and I feel as if I am making fairly good progress with my UROP - last Thursday I made a design for a printed circuit board to connect the camera we will be using for the robot submarine to its processor board, and I'm going back today to attempt to learn to program the thing!

In comparison with Cambridge, it's surprising how little time I have for extra-curricular things during the week - I really don't know how many of the others manage. Weekends are different, though, and a very welcome break; tomorrow, for part of a four-day holiday to celebrate Columbus Day, about 20 of us CMEers are taking ourselves off to Vermont to see the autumn colours - and the Ben & Jerry's factory . We're leaving early tomorrow morning, so I really ought to finish here so as to get to sleep soon; before I do, though, I will point out a few of the more recent additions to my photographs:

• Pictures from the previous CME trip, to Cape Cod - a fun weekend spent chiefly on the beach!


• Some nice autumn colours, framing a view of MIT buildings which (with a bit of imagination) spell out the letters "MIT" - the white building and its two pillars are the "M", the left-hand-pillar of what is actually a gateway arch is the "I" and the crossar of the gate makes the top of the "T" (whose downstroke is the famous point).


• My father came to visit me a couple of weeks ago, having arranged to be invited to a conference in Boston and flying out a couple of days early. It was extremely nice to see him, and we spent a very pleasant Sunday walking around Cambridge and Boston (including a harour cruise). He also brought me some linen (I hadn't brought any with me originally, but discovered once I had arrived that the stuff I had bought from one of last year's exchange students had been flooded and thrown away over the summer ) and a couple of bags of liquorice allsorts!


• What happens when a staircase gets bricked up.


• Barnum and Bailey's elephants walking down Massachusetts Avenue, from their train to the showground.


• A triumph of CAD and photoetching (originally a flat sheet of stainless steel).

I add more as I take them, not just when I post here, so keep checking (if you're that interested...).

And I'll try to make it less than four weeks until my next post...

Oh dear; I didn't mean this to be only a weekly occurrence, but this last week has again been too busy for me to have posted as frequently as I would have liked.

Classes started on Wednesday; after a flurry of organisation meetings, Registration itself was a painless anticlimax. Following (largely) the advice of the CME office, I am now taking:

• 6.004 - Computation Structures


• 6.021J - Quantitative Physiology: Cells and Tissues


• 6.111 - Introductory Digital Systems Laboratory


• 6.241 - Dynamic Systems and Control


• 14.12 - Economic Applications of Game Theory


• 18.385J - Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos

Of these, I am 'listening' to 6.021J and 18.385J (i.e. I won't get any credit for them, but I don't have to do any exams or homework); 6.241 and 18.385J (I think) are graduate-level classes, but they are still more-or-less understandable. 6.111 is nicknamed 'Digital Death' (as opposed to 6.101, 'Analog [sic] Death') due to the significant final project it includes; fortunately, that means that I won't have a final exam in that subject, or indeed in any of the others apart from 14.12. Hooray!

(Apologies for writing in numbers, by the way; MIT describes everything numerically, not only the course numbers but also buildings, the rooms within them and your eventual result!)

I am also planning to do a UROP (Undergraduate Research OPportunity), in either the Rus Robotics Lab (which makes fun robots, including modular shape-shifting ones and docking robot submarines) or with Prof Alexandra Techet (who makes fun robots, chiefly biomimetic underwater vehicles like RoboTuna). Spotting a common theme yet? I had a meeting with the former on Friday and will be meeting the latter tomorrow, after which I have to decide which to choose - quite rapidly, as the forms have to be in by Thursday...

Other than that I have been furnishing my desk, finishing off the room (unblocking the tap on the eponymous sink and putting foam on the edge of the bunk bed so my room-mate Lawrence doesn't bang his head on it every five minutes!), exploring the campus, exploring Boston (Lawrence and I went for a wander along Newbury Street yesterday and met up with the other CMEer in pika, Carol and Petra, for supper in Quincy Market)... and watching some students from the East Campus dormitory (notorious for such stunts) drop 0.5lb of sodium metal into the river Charles from Longfellow Bridge. It was quite spectacular .

I have also uploaded some of the many photos I have been taking. A few highlights:

• Some pictures from around pika, including the room (and another view), and the view from the roofdeck.


• The Frank Gehry-designed, and consequently distinctly unconventional, Stata Center (in part of which I may end up working).


• The aforementioned point.


• Quite an impressive network patch panel, seen on a tour of the computer centre.


• The Boston skyline, and that of MIT.


• Lawrence discovering the American definition of a 'regular' sized ice cream.


• Quite a few pictures from the hike in the White Mountains last weekend. Next weekend some of the other CMEers are organising a trip to Cape Cod, along with which I am tagging - it should be fun to camp for a night, as long as it's not too cold...

(Note the new style of photo layout - thank you, once again, to David Joy who originally wrote the script and modified it by a whole 0.1 version numbers at my request!)

--

This does genuinely seem like a good place to be - the people are nice, the university and city are very convivial, and the all the classes are at least interesting if not fascinating. Indeed, I was feeling a little inadequate earlier this week (though I have since regained my confidence); with all the above comes the feeling of the goalposts moving once again, but I hope I will be able to meet the challenge and make the most of the year. Watch this space!

Sorry for not posting much before now. It seems incredible, in some ways, that I have a) been here for a week already and b) only been here for a week...

So far I have: met very many new people, from Britain, America and elsewhere; been compared to Harry Potter by many of them; moved into an independent living group called "pika", in a room called "The Sink"; got to know my room-mate, Lawrence; not unpacked yet, as our floor has been being replaced by hardwood floorboards; bought a US mobile phone (+1 617 785 6567); been lectured about many different aspects of the exchange; eaten lots of free lunches; acquired at least 4 free T-shirts; decided which classes I will take for at least this semester (starting on Wednesday); broken my wireless network adaptor; discovered that, for V^2/R reasons, a kettle that works fine on 240V takes 10 minutes not to boil a cup of water on 110V; cleaned bathrooms using "Scrubbing Bubbles"; filled cracks in ceilings with "speckle" (Polyfilla); helped other pikans build a 10-foot-tall structure to attract freshers to live in pika; more or less got used to American, as opposed to English; had my accent admired by several people; been utterly dumbfounded at a binary counter using electrified gherkins as its indicator bulbs; signed up for far too many interesting-sounding societies' mailing lists; not got lost in the Stata Center (yet!); flown the point; found that my box full of bedding ktl, bought from a previous year's CME student, was soaked in a flood and has been thrown away; been out to dinner with Bob from the IDC and some of his friends; played computer games until 2am with Bob and friends, then discovered that I would need to get up at 6.30am to go hiking; hiked in the White Mountains and swum in Lonesome Lake in New Hampshire (north of Boston); discovered that Wint-O-Green flavour lifesavers really do glow if you crunch them in a dark room; spent five or more hours shaping a piece of wood to fit a gap in our room's new floor (which is now finished!); and generally had a good time!

Sorry for not updating before now - my first few days in the US have been quite hectic!

I arrived in Boston on Sunday evening, after 9 hours of travelling on IcelandAir (which, due to the paucity of in-flight entertainment, I spent drinking my last bottle of Pocari Sweat, listening to my mp3 player and trying to get my (paper!) diary into some semblance of up-to-date-ness). US Immigration was much more straightforward than I had feared (disregarding the hours of preparing for and getting my visa!), although the official thought I didn't have a visa in my passport to begin with... (And also compared me to Harry Potter.) Then we were met by CME staff and taken to our accommodation.

I am living in pika, an Independent Living Group (32 students in a house they collectively own) - its name is always written in lower case, for complicated historical reasons. I am sharing a room called 'The Sink' (because it has a sink) with Lawrence, another Course 6 (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) student from Cambridge. Plumbing aside, it is a nice spacious room - but it is also bright orange ('just the right colour for it', according to the house manager who repainted it a short while ago) and is currently being re-floored by some other helpful pikans (the original floor was indeed very tatty, but the downside of having it replaced is that we can't unpack until they're finished...). Indeed, the whole house is in the middle of 'Work Week' at present, where they fix all the little (and not so little!) DIY things that have accumulated over the year; this means that approximately everything is everywhere, probably with a layer of fresh polyurethane varnish on it too. It seems like a nice place, though - after a marathon 4-hour house meeting I know most people's names (I think), and they all seem to be friendly and ...interesting people .

The CME office has organised a whole slew of orientation activities for us, too, each with their concomitant paperwork. At least I've got my MIT card (complete with stupid picture), and we've had the lectures on visas (what exactly we are allowed to do while we are here) and healthcare/insurance already, so those are out of the way; we still have to specify our subjects (and I still have to choose mine, finally) before lectures begin next Wednesday (help!). I have met my academic advisor, who seems helpful but who (unsurprisingly) disagrees with the courses I chose on the advice of the academics in Cambridge - I have a meeting with him tomorrow afternoon to try to sort everything out. And there is a restaurant trip this evening and (hopefully) a hiking trip on Saturday to look forward to.

The atmosphere seems quite different from Cambridge - in that being eccentric and wanting to do strange things is more normal and accepted (expected?) even than there. For example, last night we started building a 10-foot-tall wooden fort-type-thing for pika's stall at the Fresher's Fair analogue (why, I don't know - I was just wielding an electric drill!), and apparently later this week someone from another dorm (hall of residence) will be dropping 1kg of sodium into the river Charles. I hope, and think, I'll like it here .

Off to Scotland for 5 days or so now; I'll be back on Friday, but then it'll be fairly frantic repacking for MIT, so the next post may well be from across the Atlantic!

Just for the record, here are the day-by-day photographs of the construction of my IDC team's robots:

• The box of materials we were given


• End of Day 1


• End of Day 3


• End of Day 4


• End of Day 6


• End of Day 7


• End of Day 8


• End of Day 10


• The robots at lunchtime on Day 11 - finally finished!

And some closeups of the main robot and the side robot after the final round.

I'm still quite impressed that we all ended up with robots that worked at all, let alone that got to the semi-finals - but then, that's the power of ingenuity and bodging!

Firstly, I have now sorted, uploaded and album-ified all my photos from the IDC - hopefully they should be a bit more user-friendly, and quick to download, now. (And yes, I have changed all the links on my previous entries to point to the new locations of the photos!)

My journey back to Britain on Wednesday was uneventful. I managed to use up all my spare yen at the airport on a diminutive webcam with yet another blue light and some more strange Japanese sweets for my family. The flight was fine, giving us an aerial view of Mount Fuji, but left me with a bit of jetlag that still hasn't (quite) gone away.

Quite fortunate, though, because on Thursday morning I had to be up bright and early for my visa interview at the US Embassy in London. Although I was at the embassy for 3 hours the actual interview was all of two minutes long (for this I paid £60!). I was told at the time that my visa would be approved, but I was still worried that it wouldn't arrive in time; fortunately I have since had a call from the couriers to say that it will arrive on Monday. Phew...

And now all I need to do is to pack for MIT, arrange UROPs, end my mobile phone contract and get ready to go to Scotland next week for a holiday!

Well, strangely enough it's the end of the IDC.

We did well in the competition - we beat both Pink and Brown teams in the preliminary round at AIT yesterday to win our place in the quarter-finals. Those took place today, in a much bigger playing field in the EXPO Dome arena in the Aichi Expo; we were victorious against Orange, the winners from the knockout competition of all the losers from the three leagues (trying to construct a contest with 11 teams gets quite complicated!), but were defeated by Blue in the semi-finals. Ah well - we were happy to get that far!

Edit: I have now put all my photos and videos of the initial rounds in AIT and the final rounds in the Expo on my website - although, of course, they don't include any of the purple team competing...

Then more of the Expo, watching robots (finally!) and exploring a very sanitised forest, before the farewell party where the UK team gave a somewhat mediocre performance of "La Macarena". I am packing now, as I need to catch a bus at 4am tomorrow (! - downwards of 4 hours' sleep) for the flight home.

It's been fun!

Sorry for the negative tone and short length of my previous entry; I was feeling tired and annoyed with myself for abandoning my team to go and watch ukai (cormorant-fishing) while they fixed what turned out to be quite a major problem with the main robot's arm. (In detail: the counterbalancing springs were too strong so the arm would lock in the "up" position, and we needed to find a way to allow the motor to pull it back down again.)

However, they fixed it (probably more efficiently without me getting in the way...) and today we finally declared both robots finished! (Barring a smattering of purple spraypaint.) And just in time, too - we had the preliminary round in the afternoon, to decide the seeding order of the teams, and managed a very respectable score of 20 points. I'm not sure where that puts us in the order, but some teams scored 28 points while others didn't score at all...

Our machines actually work a lot better than we expected, after all the bodging we've had to do - although they aren't the quickest on the field, they are some of the most versatile. And possibly the strongest, too - the main robot's arm/claw can lift the Sky Blue team's umbrellas out of the short trees, something they said couldn't be done (although it spills all the balls in the process so would be counted as a foul). Felipe and Masahiro are good drivers and have had probably just about enough practice before the first-round competition tomorrow (today!) - fingers crossed that all will go well, but I'm generally very pleased.

Sorry that I haven't written anything about any of the days off yet, but I promise I will do sometime - the problem is there is too much to say and not enough time to sit in my room blogging! (I took over 100 photos in Kyoto on Thursday, and another 30 or so at the ukai last night.)

...include:

• That it is possible, even easy, to distinguish M3, M4 and M5 bolts by eye



• That not even a Japanese summer will persuade Dr Long to exchange his white shirt for another type of garment



• That bamboo can be a better engineering material than aluminium



• That it is possible to fix any problem with a sufficiently large squirt of glue-gun glue



• That you're an engineer when:




• You hold a senko-hamabi firework and think of 3d fractal dendrites


• You go to watch traditional Japanese ukai cormorant fishing and think about Froude numbers




• That the length of time you spend on a set of calculations is inversely proportional to the likelihood that they will be correct (or even the right set of calculations in the first place)



• And that, as a result of the above, all the world is bodged together until it fits while no-one else is looking...