The crunch of metal vs. metal, the whine of gears pushed to the straining point, the cheers of victory–all are familiar sounds of the ME72 Engineering Design Contest. Caltech’s annual mechanized gladiator showdown took place in Beckman Auditorium last month. The goal of the 1999 contest, entitled "Hooks and Loops," consisted of attaching Velcro-covered geometric shapes to a Velcro wall, with higher wall zones counting for more points. For the second year in a row, the contestants competed in teams of two, but this year, each team member built his or her own machine (which nevertheless had to work with the other team member’s machine to meet specific size and weight restrictions). The 1998 winners, Eric Hale and Nathan Schara, who were also TAs for the 1999 ME72 course, built and operated Dr. Placebo–an eighteen-legged, walker-style, Caltech-beaver toting, "stand-in" used when there were an odd number of teams in a round. But after Dr. Placebo beat its opponents (a very unplacebo-like thing to do), Erik Antonsson–professor of mechanical engineering, creator of the ME72 course, and MC of the contest itself–called for a rematch. At which point, Hale and Schara invited Antonsson to step in and operate the good doctor, which then did its job and lost. In the end, the prestigious gear-shaped trophy went to junior in electrical engineering Dev Kumar and senior in engineering Steve Chung , who drove their machines to an undefeated victory. For more information on the 1999 ME72 contest, go to http://www.design.caltech.edu/Courses/ME72/.