Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Ore
As soon as they see the exceptional minibot made by another team they can study it, understand why it works, they can go back through their build season and figure out what in their thought process caused them to miss the obvious, elegant solution. If they build it, they can see firsthand how it works and begin to understand the tradeoffs within that design. In this respect, there is learning benefit to "copying" a great design.
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I think this is a fantastic point. Midseason redesign is nothing new to this competition. Since 1995 (the first time there was a regional and championship competition in a season) teams have made adjustments, often based off of what they see at a regional, in order to climb back into the race for the second chance at winning. Minibots make it much easier to copy a design and incorporate its strategy at a future competition, but I would hazard a guess that just about every team who does it has went through the painstaking learning process the first time around. They will continue to learn the lesson by building the clone and seeing what they did wrong the first time around. To be honest, I completely expect to see tons of 1.5 minibot clones at championships, and I say thank god! This game was too heavily weighted towards the minibot race from the get-go. From the standpoint of a spectator, I like the prospect of seeing more speedy minibots to make the races more interesting. The more minibots that go up the towers, the more the competition is geared towards skill in autonomous and basic scoring. With so many clones, I would imagine the focus on the minibot race will shift more towards deployment...an aspect which I think most people will say the true challenge lies in that portion of the game.