National championship scores? Thoughts on the game.
 

Posted by Alan Federman at 04/10/2001 8:26 AM EST


Engineer on team #255, Odyssey, from Foothill HS, San Jose and NASA.



I see the disional scores and championships scires but not the national schmpionship rounds. I take it that 71 is the lead seed and overall national champ - but how did the other teams do?

In general I think the game was too hard. I say this because almost no rookies(any?) were in the divisional
finals. The teams in there and especially the the top
8 in each division either had a lot of experience or a lot of money. Several of the teams could only have done as well as they did if they either finished their robot early or had a duplicate practice robot. Most of the teams in the top 8 had the experience of 2 regionals before comming into the nationals.

If the stated objective of this game was that "two good robots working together could beat any super robot working alone.." - I did not see this happening at the Nationals - though it may have happened in the regionals.

Though the idea of breaking teams up randomly into division in good in theory - it works contrary to human nature. If your a top team - you are going to pick allies that you are familiar with over those you don't know even if the stranger's performance is better.

Also - one way to beat 710 was to get small balls into the far goal -- I saw some robots that looked like they could do this - did any actually do it?

Finally while the time factor was cool I think it would have been better if it was continuous. i.e instead of a multiplier a fixed bonus 200 if you finish in 20 seconds 0 if you finish in 120 sec.
seconds.

Did anyone ever get a 3 times multiplier?

Re: Thoughts on the game.
 

Posted by Chris Orimoto at 04/10/2001 8:12 PM EST


Student on team #368, Kika Mana, from McKinley High School and Nasa Ames/Hawaiian Electric/Weinberg Foundation.


In Reply to: National championship scores? Thoughts on the game.
Posted by Alan Federman on 04/10/2001 8:26 AM EST:



After going through this year's game, I'd have to say that last year, it was much easier. However, this may be due to the fact that our robot last year was not built to hang on the bar, but that's another story.

Yes, this year's game was incredibly hard. As a drive, I know that the pressure was definitely on when balancing a bridge, especially when having to do it faster yielded more points. Last year, even when the time was running down and we had to get on the ramp, it wasn't as nerve-wracking because of the ease of the task in general.

I hope that rookie teams are not turned off by this level of difficulty...especially because I doubt that the game will get any easier in future years.

I'll also have to agree that division breakdown seemed like a good idea. I'm still waiting to see a qualification requirement to attend the nationals...that would make the regionals very interesting indeed.

The only problem I have this year's game was the auto-pairing between #1 seed and #5 seed and so forth. I'm only assuming that the purpose of this was to prevent #1 from picking #2 like in past years...therefore eliminating "super-powered" alliances. What the people at FIRST didn't realize though, is that the top seeds in this year's game will MOST likely be goal-balancers and therefore will NOT want to pick each other anyway.
For example, at San Jose, the Cheesy Poofs were the #1 seed and Monta Vista was #2. However, both robots had identical functions so I considerably doubt (Jason you may correct me if I'm wrong) that the Poofs would've picked Monta Vista if given the chance.

Oh well, enough complaining for now I guess...maybe I'll have more to say on this later.

Just my personal thoughts...

Chris, #368