Our last match is behind us, and we are now ready to enjoy being 4000+ km from home (honestly, we nearly didn't see anything of Astrakhan since we arrived...)

The results of all matches:

XD - Green Birds (Germany) : 10 - 220

Our first match was with our awesomely cool neighbors from Germany. The configuration was one of the ones we had no time to develop software for, and most of the code was still untested on real tables because most of the time there was none or they were not available. We got out of the starting zone and then the pawn-detection algorithm probably took a reflection on the (glossy) table for a pawn.

XD - Itzamna (Mexico) : 0 - 50

We played the second match with cool guys who made an awfully longer trip than ours to get there. We played blue for the first time, and it should have been a smooth match as we had ironed out and tested the problems we saw during the first match. Unfortunately, 24+h without sleep does impair your judgment, and we thought we could run a data-collecting script in parallel with the match script... big mistake. They both tried to access an unmanaged resource, and the data collecting script won, leaving no access to the match script to do its job. So the robot did not move, and after this round we were in the last position on the scoreboard.

XD - RoBUTE (Hungary) : 70 - 220

The third match went pretty well, all in all. We played with a team from Hungary that had a pit next to ours. Their robot scored a lot of points, and gave us 10 in the process ^^. In the meantime, thanks to all the work done on the image processing algorithms by JLG, Xachi managed to do its funny configuration flawlessly, earning us another 50 points.

XD - M.M.M.Malek (Czech republic) : 60 - 110

With the basic match strategy now functional, we decided it was time to get some serious fun. We had worked the whole first night on the border passing strategy, and it we finished the details like "is there a figure or a pawn directly over the border?" in the morning, so we were ready to give it a try. FLAWLESS VICTORY \o/ As you can hear in the video, the crowd was cheering, a rare sound in all the series of matches until now ;)

XD - UTP Primax (Malaysia) : 10 - 70

For the last match, we tried to renew our prowess, and also crafted a much more interesting show in case a king or a queen happened to be just on the other side of the border, but Murphy decided to come pay us a visit (it had been a long time, after all the robot had been extremely reliable until now). The way was clear to cross the border, and a t first it looked perfectly ok... until the end, when the robot decided to stop 1s earlier than expected when going back home (we suspect an exhaustion-induced typo in the code!). We did not get to show our alternative 'strategy', but that's probably for the best since it was not really polished and could fail more often than not...