[TechCoach1572]

This is a long post, but it has some 'story' in it from a tournament last weekend.

Clearly the biggest potential 'hole' in this year's rule is that the amount of points incurred for a penalty is no where near the amount of points you could cause the opposing alliance to miss by comitting the penalty. The potential points for lifting are huge and perhaps the GDC didn't foresee scores this high? The GDC could have made much stiffer penalties for those behaviors they wanted to disallow ... or perhaps they did. Did they leave it in the hands of the referees by not implementing specific rules for the amount of penalties that could be assessed per unit of time the violation occurs? I don't see anything on that...

The biggest standout in the misaligned penalties is SG5. If I have it right, ripping or slamming a crate out of your opponents grasp or off their lift while the crate is fully off the ground (but out of the protected areas) will cost you 5 points. This is an action that might prevent the opposing alliance from scoring 200 or even 400 points a few seconds later.... You could take a lot of 5 point penalties before you lost as much ground as they would gain. But I don't think the rules say how long of contact constitues a 5 point penalty, do they? Is it 1 sec? How about 5 points for each 10 mSec, meaning a 1 sec touch costs 500 points? I don't know.

Perhaps the only way to enforce the spirit of their rule would be to make the rule a disqualification for that case and not points based.

Now a story from WI last weekend ...
Historical Note: Team 217 lifted a crate to seemingly 20' in WI last weekend -- what's that, like 250 points? Amazing stuff. Great team. High integrity, graciously professional throughout. They probably were only limited by the ceiling height. They righly were in the finals. On blue.

If a video of the penultimate final match of WI is ever made viewable on YouTube, watch the blue alliance (team 217), with about 45 sec to go, intentionally take the crate slamming action to keep the red alliance from making the lift for final placement of a 2nd crate that would surely have doomed them within 10 seconds.

It worked, they knocked it out and went and lifted a mile in the air and the opposing alliance didn't have time to get the crate again (due to slightly damaged robot arm from the contact?). A Championship for the blue alliance. Or was it?

After 15 minutes the score was posted as Red 155-Blue 151 with Blue coming down from 231 with 80 points in penalties. I never heard a specific ruling on what the penaties were (there could have been more than that one spot, but I'm not so sure there was.) The referees seem to have given just enough penalty to cause the illegal behavior that casued the match outcome to flip to stay the way it would have been without it. (Again, I repeat, I don't know specifically what the penalties were, so I might have that worng)

Having interacted with the members of 217 throughout the day, they seemed like gracious professionals throughout and students of high integrity. I'm guessing they may not have even realized that what they did was a penalizable action. Even so, if they knew, was it worth the chance that the penalties wouldn't equal the gain?

Really tough call as the championship hung in the balance of the decision.

I for one hope that the referees can keep intentional penalty taking out of the game by ruling with maximum benefit of the doubt to the harmed alliance. The problem is the ealrier in the match the infraction occurs, the harder it is to determine impact.

In one match, one team lowered their bowling ball arm into impaling position and took 3 attempts at stabbing our robot. This kept us from getting to a crate we were going to and by the time we got there, the opposing alliance had moved it into a bad place. Were they intentionally entagling? If we get the create it's at least 112 points more for our alliance. Were they afraid of getting 3 penalties of 40? I think not. Cant' really give benefit of the doubt that we would have gotten the crate and gotten it up properly, though.

So it comes back to the 'morality' of how you want to play. Like others that have posted out there in cyberspace, The Supposable Thumbs would much prefer to not play heavy defense (by hitting other robots) if not heavily defended. But it seems playing defense on crates on the ground should absolutely a part of it as it creates some great learning opportunities and variety in the types of robots we'll see.