Team name:           Nederwiet
Team captain:        Erik Rozendaal
Team captain email:  dlr@acm.org
Team members:        Martin van Vliet (mpvvliet@xs4all.nl)
                     Wouter Wijngaards
Language used:       C++
Program Name:        Millennium Falcon


Description:

Here is our robot -- we called it Millenium Falcon cause it's
lightning fast. And because Marvin was a little too obvious.

This is the first time we have had almost all of the time to work on
the contest as opposed to previous years. It doesn't seem like this
has been much of an advantage as we were still short on time. :) It
was a fun task though -- can't wait to see our robot play the
others. Is there going to be a graphical server as well? It would be
nice to see all robots compete.

About the implementation

The code was written in C++. Our robot has some pretty simple rules:

- avoid getting killed!
- don't get near dangerous areas such as water or other robots (in one 
  buggy version the robot was actually terrified of itself! :) )
- explore home bases to locate packages.
- pick up packages to be delivered taking into account what destinations 
  are close (to us and to each other). This could include dropping 
  packages to make room.
- deliver a package if we are at it's destination.

All options are recalculated every turn & the best option picked. This
keeps the robot flexible -- whenever something changes, we can
instantly take advantatge of it.

Of course, this does mean we might do lots of calculations every turn,
depending on, for instance, the number of packages at the current
location. To make sure we stay at or below the 1 second per turn mark,
we introduced some global tuning to the robot. Every turn, it examines
the amount of CPU time used and adjusts a global tuning variable. This
variable influences (almost) all of the robot's algorithms, scaling
them down if we think we have used too much time. This should prevent
exceeding the runtime limit.

About the team

Two Dutch guys who moved back from the States after the dot-com crash,
reunited with a college friend. Thanks to Zappa, ferret and team
mascot.

As far as our team name goes, 'nederwiet' is the name of homegrown,
Dutch marijuana. Since both of us are from the Netherlands, we felt it
was appropriate to pick a name so typically Dutch that it has no
direct translation in English. And, of course, we couldn't change it
after having participated using this name three times in a row.
