The Silence of the Morrella is broken..., be careful what you ask for ;)
 

Hey Chris,

I wish that my lack of posting was due to some top secret info, but it's just due to lots of work and travel in the last 3 or 4 weeks. But seeing yourself and DaveL reply to this thread gives me the urge to throw in my 2 cents.

While not in the "circle" of those who have signed confidentiality agreements with FIRST regarding the game or field, I do know that those select few "trusted" by FIRST with this info have indeed given their word and signed such an agreement. This fact leads me to a few thoughts:

# 1 - if anyone affiliated with FIRST through judging or remote kickoff setup DID know the game, that would mean they were given a great deal of trust and respect by FIRST. WHY I ASK, would anyone in such a position betray this trust and divulge any actual aspects of the field or game either directly or through hints in a public forum?

# 2 - knowing this, I would assume that anyone who actually does know the field or game would have three options regarding the Chief Delphi forum and posting on it regarding the 2003 game/field:

A) they would most likely just keep the info to themselves and never make any reference or hint toward the field or game - this is the option I would assume most would take.

B) they would purposely make fun and provocative posts to get people thinking but also leading them in the wrong direction - not posting anything directly related to the game or field. This is what I would assume Mr. Wong and any others have done - (except Dave Lavery - I think he may have let something slip with his "seven Carter's Little Goal Pills and one Alludium Q36 Explosive Space Modulator" rumor - so this is what I am going to spend the next 3 weeks preparing for)

C) they would betray the trust of FIRST, go against the word of their confidentiality agreement, risk ruining one of the best parts of the kickoff for all of us - which is the anticipation and surprise of seeing the game unveiled on Jan 4th - and would basically be telling FIRST "NOT" to share any information with them ever again and "NOT" to have them involved in judging or remote kickoffs in the future. I don't see many people choosing this option.

To close....what I take from this thread is the following:
I think 98% of the people on CD know nothing about the field or game and are just guessing and throwing out ideas - which is interesting and I enjoy reading. I think a couple people who post on here may know some things, but they don't post anything related to the actual field/game and have fun misdirecting people. Even IF anyone did post anything accurate about the game, I wouldn't know what to believe anyway and I also know that Dean/Woody have changed the game MANY times even a week before the kickoff, so there's always the possibility they would do the same thing here if things were leaked - so it's all a mystery until the kickoff regardless.

For what it's worth, in the interest of fairness, sharing, and since I have signed no confidentiality agreement - I have been told by someone involved with a remote kickoff that Mr Wong is playing with some people here and that there are indeed multiple field parts/obstacles/goals which are tall and indeed movable. Besides adding that building the field objects is a bit more expensive than the past couple years, this source wouldn't tell me shape, size, weight, number, or anything more, so I've taken him off my xmas card list. :)

The one person whose post seemed strange to me was Dave Lavery, who I noticed started putting some strange footer to his posts of "Y = AX^2 + BX + C". I started to contemplate what this could mean and if it was some kind of hint about the game, but started to get a headache and realized I should have studied math more in high school - which knowing Dave tells me it may be some clue because it would give him great joy to know it was causing me mental anguish. Can anyone tell me what that equation means????

ChrisH - does that make up for my month of inactivity. :)

Hope everyone is doing well. Less than three weeks to go - unbelievable! Didn't the 2002 Championship just end????

Looks like a 2nd order polynomial... If plotted x-y, it would yield a parabola. You could try to interpret it as relating to an object in free-fall where y is the height, x is the time, A is half acceleration due to gravity, B is the original velocity, and C is the initial height. Having fun yet???

uuummmmmm....thanks, I think.
headache.....getting.....bigger.....

Is it good to combine Advil, Tylenol, AND Aleve???

The parabola pretty much plot out the course of something you throw into the air and drop back down. Hmm... Would this year similate the game of baseket ball just like how last year similate football?

When you shoot a basketball into the air, it drop back down just like an upside down parabola curve. Hehe, that would be pretty cool. Imagine goals in the field you have to shoot basket ball at, with optic sensors aiming at where the goals are. Then you get points for hanging on the goal while holding a ball in the middle of the hoop.

Even better, there are multiple hoops on the same goal, one higher than the other, each with a limit switch sensing if a ball got through or not. The higher you shoot the ball, the more points you get. The higher you can hang up, the more multiplier you get.

The goals of course will be in the middle of the field, on top of a hill with ramps on 4 side.

That's my guess anyway.

Y = AX^2 + BX + C can be solved using the quadratic equation :

Y= (-B +or- sqrt(B^2 - 4AC))/2A

only if you know some of the values though

Re: The Silence of the Morrella is broken..., be careful what you ask for ;)
 

Jason has a Christmas card list? That would be suprising. :)

Basketball!!! Woohooo!!! That would be a dream come true. The media would finally "get" the game, and it would be really fun to demonstrate locally.

However, although the equation Dave posted (Y = AX^2 + BX + C) does describe the movement of a projectile in flight, it could lead to another game...

Maybe Rich Wong's "Huge, simple" field component is a smallish sized castle... and our design challenge is to come up with trebuchets and other midevil seigeing devices. On top of the platform would be the opposing team leaders and we would be launching cream pies at them. The students on each team get to pick their leader (victim) and laugh when the opposing team splats them with a pie. Teams score higher when these victims scream louder.

The game is simple and this would allow teams to give rewards to those dedicated team leaders by force-feeding them some pie.

Sounds like fun!

Andy

ps... I also heard the rumor that this (these?) field component(s?) are expensive to build and teams are going to need to really dip into their budgets if they want to build this stuff. Man... I wish that FIRST would put out a BOM.

Re: Re: The Silence of the Morrella is broken..., be careful what you ask for ;)
 

lets all send jason christmas cards so he feels bad

stationarry ramp??
 

If U look at Mr. Wong's hints he says somehting to the extent of there are no moving parts of the feild its self. He also says look for resemblances in the 2002FLL feild and the 2000first feild. From this I concluded that it is possible...and this again is me guessing---but could U have the same bridge idea but with possibly a multileveled ramp (insted of tetter totterish bridge cuz that moves rite?). You could then have something on the next level where mabey the balls are stored or kept so in essance U have a good ol race to the balls. This would then bring back the 2000 play exept with 2x2 alliances and have the objective be get to the balls as fast as U can and get as many balls into the goals as you can.

I really doubt that there will be scoring zones like last year because I know that confused alota fans (my parents included)



Just my thoughts on The game....only 2 1/2 weeks left tell we really find out tho!!

The more I read this post, the more I like it.
FIRST wants... no, NEEDS to make a more visually friendly game. Something that can score real-time. Baskets with light or proximity sensors would work well. And something that sensors could "aim" at. More for my stratagy team to daydream about...

I would like to see a version of "King of the Hill". It could be 2 vs 2 or 3 teams with every robot for itself. This would be a simple game anyone could understand that would combine strategy with hard hitting action. I don't know about the points issue, but the game would be exciting.

B-BALL IDEA GREAT!!!!
 

Yea, it would be cool (i especially like the haging part;)) but WOW! If FIRST still wants to keep the scoring complexity to a minnimum, this is outragious! Not that the actually scoring, points wise, would be hard, just the idea of having sensors gauge the balls as they go thorough the hoops. This would NOT be a good idea, considering that it is very easy to say a computer messed up, or even having a computer mess up. it would add more complexity to the feild assembly and shipment.... Even if it were possible to construct and ship without fault, there would have to be a "human" judge(s) counting the balls and trying to accuratly count the amount going thorough. (bad)
i think it would be more likely to see a leveled trough goal. Where at one end of the feild there is multiple levels of bars, close anough to the wall or another bar behind it to be able to balance the balls on top. (the bars would run the legnth of the feild) And there would be multiple hights of troughs on top of eachother, the higher up the more points. AND there would also be a point value for Hanging on one of the bars....<<<a more likely speculation.

Since there is probably going to be an autonomous part of the competition, there will probably be a white line on the field that the robots are going to have to follow using the light sensors.

who said anything about 'probably' being an autonomous part? Previous posts said it would be a neat idea.

And DaBrute: that's a bit to close to 2000's game for FIRST to be choosing it.

Nothing is the same
 

If you all remember the letter stating that regionals will be cutting back on costs due to economic stress. Well Whats to say they weren't trying to save money for something completely different? New field? yeah. Off the wall objective? yeah. Evil rules that give us all headaches and tremors? Definitly. And a twist, like the 180 lbs. goals, or 4 vs. 0, whatever it may be, definetly off the wall.

Re: Nothing is the same
 

They already had a 4 player co-op thing if I recall. It is not exciting to watch and from what I heard not near as fun to play as 2 on 2 things.