04. August 2008 - RoboCup 08 - Summary

Since it was not possible to provide logfiles of our matches during the competition, they are presented here in summary afterwards. An overview on the tournament mode is given on this site (from brainstormers).

The first round consisted of 4 groups of at most 4 teams. We were in the last group which only had 3 teams in it due to one missing team. Our opponents were Oxsy and NCL:

The first round determined the constitution of the groups of the next round. Since we placed 2nd, we subsequently played in group E, which had 7 teams in it:

With this result we qualified for the quarter finals, which was played in double elimination mode. Our first opponent was Oxsy. Thereafter we had to play (and losse) against the Brainstormers, and thus went on in the loosers round. Our next opponent was Helios, and we lost by a small margin in the extended time by a golden goal. Finally we had a placement match against Oxsy.

Finally we placed 6th, our best result so far.

21. July 2008 - Day 9 and 10: Final Games and Final Visits

The schedule for the final competition was as follows: First the placement matches for all teams above the (possibly) 5th rank where played, starting from the lowest. Even though the teams only competed for the lower places, each of them again did their best to win and to finish with a good performance. Also for us, the fifth place would be worth much more than the sixth, and thus we worked again till deep into the night. On submitting the code for the quarter finals some issues were left open or uncompleted because of time constraints, and we had the will to bring the team to its best possible strength on the last match. In fact, most of these issues seemed to be resolved in the early morning hours, such that we started a test tournament and went to bed for some hours of sleep. On the next morning we just decided to not submit one of the things we implemented (passing by tackling), because it reduced the runtime performance significantly. Everything else seemed to work quite well.

Then we drove to the venue for the last time, made a few tests and finally laid our fate into the hands of the god of bits and bytes (I've donated a few yuan the day before to him - or at least I thought it was he, but maybe I've misunderstood the writings...). The matches were quite exciting, both - those of the good teams and of the not so good ones. Ours started on 11.20. To summarise, it was a somewhat strange match. Oxsy seems to had improved its strength during the night, and we hadn't had a chance. The first goal fell very early in the first half. The next one a few moments later. Before half time, we managed to score as well, such that we had the chance to come up again. But sadly the second half went even worse, and the match was finished with 5:2 for Oxsy.

BremenA few words to the final game: The Brainstormers played against WrightEagle, aconstellation which happens in the finals for the last three years. 2006 in WrightEagle won, and became world champion. The next year - 2007 in Atlanta - the Brainstormers won very comfy. Taking into account that its team leader was the only one that tuned the team during that competition, this outcome was a very impressive result. This years final started under the assumption, that if team WrightEagle wins the first match, a second one has to take place, because WitghtEagle got to the finals via the loosers round of the double elimination (where each team has to loose twice before being eliminated from competition). The effort of team WrightEagle was easily visible when looking into their tired faces - obviously they tuned the whole night. In fact, the game of WrightEagle was completely different than that of the matches before. The whole strategy was adopted to fit to the opponent, and it seems that theyhad done well - they won the first game by 1:0. So, the decision has to bemade in another final game (the final final). Since the code was the same as before, some of us expected WrightEagle to win - but this time the defense of the Brainstormers stood upright, and after the regular time the game was a tie (0:0). Next, the extra halfs started, and a golden goal would determine the champion, if one happens. But again, both teams could not score, and finally the champion had to be decided by the penalty shootout. This was the first time ever, that the champion had to be determined by penalty shootout. WrightEagle proved their skills in that discipline during the round before, where they outperformed Helios. I don't really know how to describe best, how exciting the shootout was. Although there were only small circles running over a green area, everyone of the spectators was shouting and hoping the small white circle will either enter the black area behind the goalie (which in fact was a circle of another size), or will be intercepted by him. But once one team missed a shoot, the other could not make use of that for very long. Both teams where almost equal in strength. If the decision was not made after ten shootouts for each, the game ends, and it would be up to the committee to find a way to determine the champion. Finally - the Brainstormers could make use of one miss of team WrightEagle, and again was the winnerof the championship.

A few words to our result: Although a sixth place is not that bad (even better than our previous results), we all hoped for more. The critical match was the lost game against Helios, which was decided in the first extra half by a golden goal. If we would have won that, in my opinion, we could have became third, because Amoiensis would be defeatable as well (at least in our tests). On the other hand we had some luck as well. Oxsy is a very strong team, and we probably could have lost against them in our first match of the quarter finals (I promise to link the game logs on this site as soon as possible). Thus the sixth place is a realistic result in that it reflects our strength compared to the other teams, and keeping in mind that we are close to the teams that were ahead (ignoring the Brainstormers in that calculation :-).

Some moments after the games were over, the stress slowly dropped away from us and we began to think of something else than robocup (of course after making some photos of the other teams and us). For the last one and a half day, we intended to visit some places of Suzhou and Shanghai. Since this is the touristic part of our trip, I will omit the details except this one: China is worth a visit!!

We hope to see you soon back in Berlin
Team DAInamite

19. July 2008 - Day 7 and 8: Preparation and Execution of the Quarter Finals

As commented before, we had a break of games on friday, such that we had time to recover (mainly to sleep), and gather some ideas for the upcoming quarter finals. Therefore we decided to have an elaborated breakfast in the ancient city of Suzhou, which is a very nice place. Since the breakfast happens in the early afternoon, we had to enjoy some chinese hot meals - can you guess what it is? We gave our very best to integrate into the culture (as you may see by the photo), but the chinese people easily recognised us as strangers. How did they found out ... ?

Then we returned to our hotel and prepared for another long night of programming. Since we knew the next opponent (Oxsy from Romania, the winner of the Hefei Competition, which took place a few weeks ago), we could tune our team in a very specific manner. Thus, besides fixing some bugs (such as the disconnected goalie), we introduced some specific behaviours that should outplay some weak parts of Oxsy. As the morning came, we felt that we had left too many issues open, and were not very optimistic to beat them.

Our game was the second game on that day, and it was really exciting. Both teams had some good offenses, and until the very last part of it, none could score a goal. Oxsy had shot once very close next to our goal post, and we had also very good offensive moves. Finally we managed to score and reached the next round. The next game we had was against the Brainstormers. These are again very strong and hard to beat. Since we concentrated on Oxsy to ensure the achievement of the next round, we had not really tested against them. Finally the result was very clear - we lost 4:0. However, since the tournament mode is based on double elimination, we proceeded to the loosers round and had even the chance to reach the finals. Sadly our next match was against Helios, a very good team fom Japan and another favourite for the title. Again we where surprised how good our team performs. The match was very balanced - both teams had good moves. It seemed that our defense stays safe against them, and we all hoped to score the first goal. After 6000 cycles (about 10 minutes) the match counted a 0:0 score, and we had to proceed to the extra halfs, which had 1000 cycles each with golden goal rule. During the first half, one defender missed a tackle, and Helios had a nearly free shot - thats
it. Damn!!

Finally we have to play ranking matches. Since we won the first game against Oxsy, we are at least placed sixth, an improvement by 3 places compared to he
previous years. If we win tomorrow (again vs. Oxsy), we will make the fifth place. Lets see how they prepare for us this time ...

Best wishes from Suzhou
Team DAInamite

17. July 2008 - Day 6: The quarter-finals are waiting ...

The most important news of the day is, that we reached the quarter finals. After missing it very shortly in the competitions 2006 (Bremen) and 2007(Atlanta -both times with the ninth place) we are somewhat happy to break the curse of loosing by a somewhat small margin in the very last moment.

This time we had both - bad and good luck. The first games against OxBlue and OPU Hana went very well. We won 2:1 against OxBlue, which performed very good for their first competition, and 2:0 against OPU Hana, which had a strong team during the qualification, but showed a strange behaviour in these matches. They defended with almost all players beginning at the middle line, and gave up ball possession when entering our half. Though there was no chance of conceiving a goal, scoring was quite hard (but not impossible).

After a break due to the other teams games we played against Nemesis and AmoiensisNQ. Nemesis is well known to us, and in the last competitions the results against them were quite balanced. This years competition made no difference - we played 1:1. They got in front with an early goal, but then our team stayed constant and was able to score and reach a draw. The next game was meant when I speak about bad luck. We lost 0:6 against AmoiensisNQ, because our goalie had disconnected. This has never happened in the last 3 years and we were very surprised about that. If we had won (which was not
very unlikely because in our test games we almost always won), we had good chances of a second place in that round (the Brainstormers are again very strong).

The next match was against the Brainstormers (the champion of 2007) themselves. As expected we lost (4:0). Probably, if we encounter them in a later round, we could tune our team especially against them, but that is no god tactic in a round where you have 6 different opponents. Now we had one last game against Leakin Drops - an iranian team, which on a win would ensure the entry to the quarter finals. Luckily that team was the weakest, and we expected a clear win. This time it came different - DAInamite showed some strange behaviours, and although we scored the first goal, the Leakin'Drops often came close to our goal. One time they missed our goal by a very small margin ... Then
the luck turned once more. As with our team before one agent of the Leakin'Drops disconnected for some unknown reason, and we had an advantage of securing the win. Maybe that was too much of good luck, or maybe the competition machines had some network problems. Anyhow - one agent of team DAInamite disconnect as well (luckily not the goalie this time,
that would be the worst case), and for the last 1000 cycles (100 seconds) the game was dynamite for our nerves. Finally we won with 1:0 and reached our first quarter final ever.

Tomorrow, group F runs, and we have no games on that day. Though we surely will use the time to improve and debug our team, today we need to recover. We spent the whole night without sleep to get the best out of our framework, and then we had a very stressing day by watching the curious games.

By the way, if it works, I will upload some flash files of the matches in the next time. This became a littlebit difficult because of some changes to the currently used server software.

Tomorrow we will check out who is our next opponent. Probably this will be Oxsy, the team from Romania against which we played in the first round. But others are also possible.

This much for today. Here is the table of our games in compact notation:

Group E

• DAInamite : OxBlue            2:1
• DAInamite : OPU Hana       0:2
• DAInamite : Nemesis          1:1
• DAInamite : AmoiensisNQ   0:6
• DAInamite : Brainstormers  0:4
• DAInamite : Leakin'Drops    1:0

Overall result

• Points:     10
• Placement:  3 of 7
• First opponent in quarter final: 2. Place of Group F

Team DAInamite