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Unread 01-06-2011, 17:24
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Jon Stratis Jon Stratis is offline
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Re: Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!

Quote:
Originally Posted by Tristan Lall View Post
Now, I'm pretty sure this was actually won—and lost for that matter—by programmers and their dueling scripts, so the net loss to society could be smaller than that $2 800 figure. On the other hand, how many of us would be happy at a wage rate of $7.25/h? (I'm thinking that this enlarged the loss to society, given the calibre of participants in this thread.)
I really hope not. Multiple people (including people from WAVE) posted here that using such scripts simply isn't right. It's cheating, it's likely against the rules of the program and, if caught, would DQ Wave, and finally it's not GP to try to go around the purpose of something like this.

Quote:
So next time someone posts asking you to click on something repeatedly or do some other menial task, and the sheer absurdity of it doesn't dissuade you from helping out, either:
  • Automate it out of a combination of expediency and protest. (The problem-solver's solution.)
While certainly a creative and educational way to tackle the problem, I suggest the next time someone asks you to do something like this, you think of the purpose behind it, the sponsor(s) behind it, and how doing something like that is likely to go completely against the intent and values of the program you are attempting to support.

I certainly encourage people who want to tackle a project like automating something like this to attempt to do so... it's a great educational tool and you'll learn a lot doing it. But to please, please not actually use it.

Big mammoth corporations (Like Activision, for example) have spent millions of dollars combating scripts like those you suggest in their multiplayer games. Pick your favorite online multiplayer game, and think about the repetitive stuff you have to do to improve your character/team/account/whatever. Creating a script to do it for you seems very tempting... but doing so also gives you an unfair advantage over everyone else playing. To equate this to FIRST... it's like a team going into a competition this past year with 6 CIM motors. It's against the rules and gives them an unfair advantage... but if they bury them in the robot so they aren't visible and no one catches them, they win, right?
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