Histories

I had remembered SimSpark as a 2003 project. Going back through the old repository corrected me: the story begins a year earlier, on 6 August 2002, with a four-page document called New Soccer Server Initiative. I had contacted Artur Merke and Martin Riedmiller, and the optimistic ellipsis after our names suggests that we must have hoped to add more. The proposal argued that the established two-dimensional soccer server should remain stable as a scientific benchmark, while a new open-source simulator should be built from scratch. The wish list already contained three-dimensional physics, flexible sensors and actuators, variable-speed experiments, extensible objects and, eventually, humanoid robots. The first implementation commits followed six days later.