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xviii Foreword

out by some readers, who said they would have appreciated a book describing chal-
lenging projects, each looked at in great detail.
Actually, the shelves of many bookshops offer many excellent books containing
step-by-step instructions for building LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. Nevertheless,
if you look carefully you will discover that some of these books are aimed at intro-
ducing the reader to the basics of the MINDSTORMS world, therefore describing
only very simple robots. On the other hand, there exists a second group of books
that show step-by-step instructions, but lack substantially detailed explanations about
the building techniques used by the authors and the general concepts that are funda-
mental to the projects.
These reflections are the foundation of LEGO MINDSTORMS Masterpieces,
whose goal is presenting some very sophisticated projects with the maximum level of
detail. In the book you hold in your hands you will find not only high quality step-
by-step instructions for building all of the robots, but also a complete description for
each of them, including goals, building techniques, programming techniques, and the
theory supporting the designer’s choices.
In my opinion what makes LEGO MINDSTORMS Masterpieces really special is
the fact that it is not the work of a single person, but rather the result of the cooper-
ation of a team of authors.The fact is that any designer tends to adopt his or her
own building “clichés”, a collection of standard solutions to common problems that
they use again and again to save design time.This isn’t laziness, but rather the normal
behavior of the human mind.When faced with a new problem, the first solutions
that come to mind are solutions that have already been successful in similar (but per-
haps not identical) cases.Additionally, every designer has their own personal style, a
set of unexpressed rules that guide building choices toward something that the
designer prefers to use, even if another solution exists that would work equally as
well or better. For these reasons different creations built by the same person typically
show many similarities; a sort of common background that results in what can be
thought of as a “family resemblance” among their designs.
The MINDSTORMS Masters that wrote this book brought to it a wide variety
of ideas and a wealth of strategies that a single author could simply never hope to
offer.This diversity is exactly what we are offering in this book, which we called —
with a bit of immodesty — LEGO MINDSTORMS Masterpieces.Whether these cre-
ations could be considered real masterpieces is not for me to say, but what I am sure
of is that we devoted a considerable amount of time to choosing and presenting pro-
jects that push the possibilities of the MINDSTORMS RIS system towards its limits,

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