Team 57's 6.270 page

Our Robot's name is Mars Polar Lander.   It has large yellow eyes and a bent green baseboard scoop.  We had a lot of fun building Mars Polar Lander, but ran out of time to debug it.  We think that it would have had a good chance at winning the contest if we had finished.  Due to some unknown bug that seemed to have introduced itself since we last touched the code, we did not score any points at all during the final rounds, though we won our qualifying round with a robot that seemed to do almost what we wanted it to do.  In retrospect, perhaps we should have kept our qualifying code.  On the the other hand, the new code seemed to work allright the last time we tested it (though we did not try the last code on the contest board that night, we could not reproduce the tests we did do with the code that was locked in our robot for the final contest).

The biggest problem, and our downfall, was driving.  Tested separately, our sorting mechanism worked flawlessly for sorting any block that entered it, and there was only an occasional problem with another block jamming the mechanism.  Not only did it work well, but it worked almost right away.  Therefore, if we had run over any black blocks during the round, we would have scored those points (our gate mechanism also worked quite well).

Our Final Strategy:

In the event that this was successful, we would have next added the simple step of stopping on the jail and releasing the black blocks, perhaps leaving our good block gate open the entire time in order to prevent dragging them to our jail.