Well, I'll tell you.
You see, all through IAP I kept coming up with names for our robot, some of which Chris liked, some he didn't. I also kept trying to get Chris to come up with names, which I don't think he ever did. Anyway, here are some other names we were considering:
iRobot - "Say hello to iRobot." With the success of the iMac there is an i-just-about-everything now, so we thought an iRobot would fit right in. We are both "Mac people" and Chris just got a new iMac DV SE.
Polar Bear - This was an inside joke between Chris and myself. Someone (I'm not sure who) once demonstrated an interesting characteristic of the mind for me by inviting me to try to stand in the corner and not think about polar bears. As you might imagine, this is quite difficult. I used this as an example while explaining something frustrating to Chris, and the source of my frustration, someone which I constantly try not to think about but always think about anyway, quickly became known as The Polar Bear. We laughed about this so much over IAP we considered calling our robot Polar Bear, but while we ended up calling it something else, this is actually the name used in the code.
Roach - Our robot was thin and fast and vicious and snarfed things into its mouth with mandibles. And yes, we are aware of other meanings for this word, thank you very much.
Mouse - Our robot looked like a mouse, thought like a mouse, acted like a mouse, and smelled like a mouse. And oh yeah, it was supposed to have a mouse ball. We also saw a mouse running up the steps in Lobdell while we were eating dinner one night, and thought that was funny.
Fuzzy Logic - After implementing our "random walk navigation" kluge, our robot would sometimes do very smart-looking things while actually being very stupid, and I jokingly told people it employed "fuzzy logic navigation". However, we suspected there may have been another robot named Fuzzy Logic and we didn't want to be unoriginal.
Fuzzy Illogic - This was Chris' answer to the problem of being unoriginal. The name was also more accurate, seeing as there was very little actual logic employed in our navigation "algorithm".
Snarfy - I came up with this for some weird reason after seeing the funny way it ran around the table bumping into things. It looked pretty stupid. Chris thought the robot looked like a Snarfy, too, so we ended up going with this name with Chris' addition of "The Bunder Wot" to indicate it was clearly not a "Wonder Bot". The silly name also was an indicator of where we were mentally and emotionally at the time. I later expanded the name to its final form: Snarfy the Bonder Wot, Whose Beautiful Hardware Was for Nought.