April 4, 2011, 12:01 pm

Reusing previous years code for SDP?

There are plans to change the way the UoE SDP course runs: next year, change the milestones to more tournaments, and reuse previous years code. See the email from Philip Wadler:

Dear SDP, We are considering running next year’s SDP differently. Instead of setting a number of milestones, we are considering basing the performance portion of the mark entirely on competition games. As before, we will provide the students with archived code and designs of previous year’s robots. We will set the first competition for early in the term, so groups will almost certainly need to reuse work from previous years. I would be interested in any feedback on this plan, or suggestions for improving the course next year. Recall the course guide states: “Reports have three purposes: to provide sufficient information to assess your work; to document for the group and yourself your design and what you have done; and to provide useful information for anyone who wants to build on what you have done in future.” In light of the above plan the third purpose may correspond to a real audience, so please write your group and individual reports accordingly. Thanks again for a fantastic year of SDP, and enjoy your break. Yours, –P

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – John F. Woods

I replied to this, mentioning the possibility of providing a stripped-down framework for the students to build on, which would still require them to write some code, but without some of the work that took up the first 2 weeks or so. Phil then asked why we shouldn’t just give them our code, so they can improve on it. This was my reply:

Well, I thought that it would remove some of the collaboration aspect of SDP (learning about version control etc), when they didn’t have to write much code themselves. However, I’m sure there could be considerable improvements even to the winning group’s code: if I recall this year’s winning team was running their code on 4 separate machines! A colleague makes a good point though: reusing the vision system takes out a fair bit of the work and learning experience, as once you’ve got solid vision code that tracks the robots and ball across the whole pitch, there’s probably not a huge amount to change, apart from perhaps interface. The groups would still have to edit the code to suit their robot design, but could use different ideas from different groups. I imagine some members of this years SDP course will object, as without thinking about it it seems to imply that next years teams would have less work to do. If the opportunity is there though, the groups would have the choice between writing code from scratch, or using last years code. All in all, it seems a good idea. It would also be interesting to see 2 versions of this year’s winning robot face off against each other! Regards, Alex

So, I think I do actually agree with him: it seems like it takes out a lot of work, but there’s some serious optimization that could happen even to the winning team’s code. Plus, if they want to use holonomic wheels, it would allow us to see some really cool stuff tactics-wise, instead of just it moving sideways… I’ll keep you all updated via here and twitter: @shearn89