Finals

Hey all :).

I do so enjoy generally not having deadlines. However, I am now in the period of the year where deadlines are looming threateningly, and so won’t be able to blog this week :/. Someday I will be able to say I don’t have finals, but today is not that day! (As an aside, my friends and I counted recently, and I’m a 20th-grader. How excellent and absurd is that?)

Hope you all had great Thanksgivings if you’re living here and great weeks if not, and talk to you all later!

Monica

p.s. for more detail, combined human-robot trajectory planning is kicking my butt. (The problem: if a human moves this way to achieve a goal, and a robot is trying to coordinate with it, then what movement does the robot make in response?) Also, attempting to run optimization algorithms is hard. (What even is optimization? It’s like– most generally in this domain, trying to find the best solution to a difficult problem using a bunch of math/programming tricks people have come up with, and you just need to adopt to your specific problem. But there are so many details to that statement :P). However, I’m now at the point where I’m like: “oh, wait, that equation doesn’t make sense, let me attempt to make it make sense,” instead of “ahhh I’ll do whatever you tell me to just give me more equations and I will force it into code!” Even when I’m wrong with my fixes, the fact that I’m able to try is quite satisfying.