[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by JVN

I always hope that this is a place where we can all wear our "team hats" and discuss the issues that matter to us. I hope that perhaps others in similar situations would don their team hats and come back here in the interest of common discourse. Perhaps that hope is naive.

I really hope that feedback here does not dissuade you from continuing to participate. While I don't have a substantial presence here I do enjoy reading your blogs and posts and have no trouble distinguishing between your team position and your work position. Your writing is typically very thought provoking and causes me to analyze my own methods and biases. We all need those invitations to think deeper about things. Even though I don't know you personally, I've garnered a lot of inspiration from your published thoughts and your team's designs. This particularly helps a lot this time of year when I'm feeling burnt out.

We are all seeking for simplicity on the other side of complexity. So regardless of the complexity inherent in the engineering challenge, the size of the simple and hence elegant solution set will likely be small. Prevalence of a particular design will then most likely be inversely proportional to the implementation difficulty. When the game design focus narrows to a small set of objectives then we will see convergence on simple easily implemented solutions as we iteratively improve through competition.

One way of counterbalancing this phenomena is to expand the scope of game objectives. Instead of one or two objectives achievable by a single robot have a multitude of objectives including those requiring multiple robots in order to achieve. Unfortunately this is often at odds with the desire to have a audience friendly competition. I think this balance between game objectives and observability is a difficult one.

One last thought for now... In prior games, it seemed like the game design accommodated both excellent robot design as well as strategy. As robots converge on physics limited performance, the differences between alliance should therefore be resolved via strategy. However given the scoring distribution, it seems likely that difference between alliances may be determined by luck which is very unsatisfying.