Just a quick update – we are in fact alive. Sorry for the lack of posts recently. The semester has started and the team is beginning to pick up steam again. We had a presence at the Student Activities Fair which presents first years with many of the extracurricular activities available at Bowdoin. We are planning on visiting some of the beginning to intermediate computer science courses to drum up some interest, as well as having an informational meeting this Sunday at 9 PM.
Many of the senior members of the Northern Bites are working on Honor’s Projects this semester. Areas being researched include bipedal walking, robots that learn to see better through human training, figuring out where on the field a robot is based on the position of his opponents, and distributed computing and its relation to machine learning.
We are working with a new version control system this year called git; we just had a seminar on its usage last night. We hope that it will help us in situations where internet access is spotty, such as at all the major RoboCup competitions we have attended thus far.
I’m a big fan of Mercurial, a distributed version control system written in Python. For RoboCup all you really need is *some* offline method of getting at the repository, the specific tool (git vs. mercurial vs. bazaar) doesn’t really matter.
Alternately, if you do it carefully, you can package up your existing SVN repository and put it on a laptop which then operates as the “server” during the competition. When you get back, just copy the latest code to your usual repository via one gigantic commit. This is what we do, because the random undergrads who join the team often have at least some experience with SVN but not necessarily any experience with distributed version control (which seems scarier than it is, at first glance. :))