[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

Inspiring and anecdotal.

Given the lack of hard data, anecdotal evidence is what you're going to get.

We live in the boonies, 20 miles from either a stoplight or a Lowes (ten more for a Home Depot). The huge majority of business in our town is wine -- which won't even consider sponsoring a high school program for obvious political reasons. We have explicit restrictions on how many fundraisers we are allowed to do each year (2), and have a hard time attracting engineering mentors willing to make the drive.

Those are all reasons, but they're not excuses. Your choice, regardless of what resources you have, is to aspire to excellence or don't. (There are ancillary choices, such as "bemoan your lot or don't" and "seethe with envy or don't", too.)

We know FIRST isn't "fair", just like everything else. We don't allow that fact to do anything but push us to improve.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

I just think it would have been better if the competitions were more fair.

I would absolutely hate to see parity imposed by knocking the elite teams down. FIRST is the challenge that it is specifically because you're not just trying to build a robot that can accomplish tasks, you're trying to build a robot that can accomplish tasks better than everyone else's robots.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

(Since nobody is disputing the fact that the game unfairly gives an advantage to teams that have experience, money, and mentors, I guess we can agree to disagree on the way our values work. Mine: fair -> more inspired.)

I'll dispute it. "Fairness" is both arbitrary and irrelevant. You might as well complain that it's unfair that teams that know things about robots have an advantage over teams that don't. This undisputed "fact" is a "fact" only insofar as the statement "advantages are advantageous" is a fact.

There are already many rules that force some level of parity, from materials utilization to BOM cost restrictions to time restrictions. I'm willing to bet that if you tried to come up with more rules to enforce parity, in public on Chief Delphi, you'll find that it's a lot harder than it sounds -- and that many of your ideas will actually skew things even more in favor of elite teams.

tl;dr version: Elite teams aren't elite because of the inherent bias of the system, they're elite because of what they do within that system.

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

Never assumed anything. I think you're taking my quote out of context. I was referring to *some* top teams, and not all, and I made that clear in my post.

Which ones?

Originally Posted by Patrick Chiang

That's great. This is how a lot of top teams work, and I have *absolutely* no problem with that.

Which ones?

Originally Posted by Kim Masi

Take professional sports, for example. You're either a Yankees fan, or a Yankee hater. I'm not saying this is something we should strive for, but its up to the individual students and their teams to rise above it.

Yankees... Yankees... They do something with a ball and a stick, right? Some running around, too?