Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesBrown
Put an FRC robot on a field by itself, no human driving it, what will it do? Robots are still not capable of being athletes, the most sophisticated robots in the world are capable of playing games with varying degrees of success, FRC robots are not even capable of that. Without a human driver there were no robots in breakaway that could be considered athletes, they are really just machines. We are decades away from anything close to a machine that can reason and function well enough to force us to examine our definition of an athlete.
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Umm, that sounds an awful lot like autonomous...
Yes, I realize that a 15 second autonomous is far from complete artificial intelligence. That aside, I tend to agree with you that the robots are not athletes. Also, I'm not sure I see the point of arguing too much over whether or not FIRST is a sport, even on a financial level. I am a member of my school's marching band, and while we are not considered a sport, a lot of money goes into the program. It isn't close to the budget of the football team, but honestly, comparing a club's budget to a football team is never a good idea. If you compare the budget of a swimming team, which seems to fit all of the definitions of sports that have been posted so far, to a football team, the swimming team is going to come up way short almost without exception.
FIRST markets itself as a sport because many concepts often associated with sports, lots of extracurricular hours, exciting spectator events, and the development of talents within the athlete/student, to list a couple, are part of FIRST. Currently, most people categorize extracurricular activities as clubs or sports. To call FIRST a club does it a gross injustice, as the vast majority of clubs fail to provide the excitement and motivation that FIRST provides. While FIRST is not necessarily the epitome of a sport, sport is definitely a better classification of FIRST than club. In reality, FIRST falls into an interesting niche that cannot really be classified definitively as a sport or as a club. IMHO, this has a lot to do with the fact that FIRST seeks to emulate and expose students to the professional world, using the excitement of a sporting event as a cover for this purpose.
As a side note, I think you guys are focusing way too much on student drivers. The position of student driver is rarely held by anywhere close to the majority of students on the team. I don't think I saw any posts mentioning either the scouting or the spectator aspect. While these are not part of most dictionary definitions, they are a key part of the connotation of what is a sport.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents