There were some surprises today, at least to anyone who expected the
same rankings as two weeks ago. Jussi Pajala's WappuCar totally
dominated the expert race, as did Bill Benedict's Rusty in the novice
race. Burns, by Safai Ma, also did quite well in the novice race, so
that Rusty and Burns joined Indretti, Ramdu and Wappucar for the
expert race. Both did well against the experts, especially Rusty,
which finished second. If you want to know how they did it, ask 'em!
There was one new programmer joining the competition, Carl Burke,
whose robot, Blender, managed fourth in the novice race. Since
Grant Reeves withdrew his robot from today's race, we again had a
total of nine competitors. Most of the authors, however, sent in
new versions of their robots in order to handle the fourmile track,
which is difficult to navigate successfully.
All nine robots will be zipped together into the file 4milebots.zip
and put on the ftp site right away. (There is source code for all,
but not always in English.) The race was run on version 0.50, with
no changes except linking in these nine 'bots, with "dynamic" filling
up the other 7 places in the drovers[] array. A copy of the carz.cpp
that was used will be included in 4milebots.zip.
Here are the race.out files for the two races:
Novice Race:
6 cars for 50 laps. The track was fourmile.trk. The drivers were:
Rusty, Bingo1, Burns, Heath2, OscCar2, and Blender.
starting positions:
Blender, Rusty, Heath2, Burns, Bingo1, and OscCar2.
place 1 Rusty average speed 86.9 mph 10 points accumulated
place 2 Burns average speed 81.59 mph 6 points accumulated
place 3 OscCar2 average speed 80.71 mph 4 points accumulated
place 4 Blender average speed 80.47 mph 3 points accumulated
place 5 Heath2 average speed 80.33 mph 2 points accumulated
place 6 Bingo1 average speed 77.09 mph 1 points accumulated
------------------------------------------------------------------
Expert Race:
5 cars for 50 laps. The track was fourmile.trk. The drivers were:
Rusty, Burns, Indretti, Ramdu, and WappuCar.
starting positions:
Burns, Ramdu, WappuCar, Indretti, and Rusty.
place 1 WappuCar average speed 88.05 mph 10 points accumulated
place 2 Rusty average speed 86.95 mph 6 points accumulated
place 3 Ramdu average speed 84.56 mph 4 points accumulated
place 4 Burns average speed 81.58 mph 3 points accumulated
place 5 Indretti average speed 78.98 mph 2 points accumulated
------------------------------------------------------------------
Starting with today's races I will be accumulating points for the
authors. Here are the standings after today's races:
Expert Class Point standings
Jussi Pajala 10 pts (Finland)
Bill Benedict 6 pts (U.S.A.)
Randy Saint 4 pts (U.S.A.)
Safai Ma 3 pts (Canada)
Mike Inman 2 pts (U.S.A.)
Novice Class Points:
Oscar Gustafsson 4 pts (Sweden)
Carl Burke 3 pts (U.S.A.)
Patrick Tierney 2 pts (Canada)
Tristrom Cooke 1 pt (Australia)