[Alan Anderson]

After mulling it over for a very long time, I figured out both my answer to the question and my reasoning for the answer.

The answer is an unapologetic no. I would never encourage a team to deliberately lose a match by giving less than full effort.

The answer is so obviously right in my view that it was hard for me to come up with a rational argument for it. Here it is: qualification matches are intended to rank robots according to their ability to play the game. Throwing a match undermines that intent. Your team is supposed to be seeded based on performance in the robot game, not on clever application of game theory.

Since ranking is going to be imperfect, this argument is likewise imperfect; the "best" robot isn't guaranteed to be ranked at the top. But I believe it's important not to try to manipulate rankings, and instead to play your best and let the rankings follow naturally from that.