Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris Hibner
Larry,
In many ways, I really agree with you. I grew up playing a lot of sports and good sportsmanship was ingrained in me from the start. Unlike a lot of people, I know that being extremely competitive and being a good sport are not mutually exclusive.
However, coopertition is a life lesson that FIRST is trying to teach that isn't well understood in a lot of American life. The fact is, in real life you can be very competitive yet still benefit by working with your competitors in certain areas.
This is a very foreign concept in the US, but a lot of examples are out there. The best example is the "Group of 5" - the alliance of German auto companies. I was introduced to this when I worked for an automotive supplier that had a decent presence in Europe - I even attended a Group of 5 meeting at Porsche's headquarters one summer.
The Group of 5 was highly competitive with each other in their market, but they realized that they could gain a competitive advantage over the rest of the world by cooperating on certain advancements that helped reduce costs among them, but didn't really make for a competitive performance advantage. Basically, they collaborated on things that made life easier for all of them.
Many of the things that started out as Group of 5 collaboration efforts have become world-wide standards since then, such as CAN and CCP. Virtually every control system in the world now uses CCP as the standard method of calibration and data collection.
The point is, FIRST wants to point out that you can be competitive, yet still find ways to improve your standing AND someone else's standing at the same time. Personally, I think the coopertition bridge this year has been by far the best example of showing this concept.
Yes, it's just a robot competition, but FIRST's greater mission is to get people thinking of bigger picture things along the way.
On a final point, I don't really think the seeding has been out of whack this year. If you look at the standings from the vast majority of competitions, you see the usual suspects.
And by the way, it was nice meeting you at dinner in St. Louis last year.
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First, I think it's cool that you remember me from then...
(Long post ahead)
My beef with co-opertiton is that sometimes it gets manipulated too easily... like 6 vs 0 in 2010 or this year, where boxes on wheels are becoming alliance captains:
Where the co-op bridge bit falls short is this common scenario:
We have an alliance in Qualification XXX:
1 Shootbot
2 Boxbot
3 Shootbot
What usually happens is the alliance decides that they will send #2 to try to balance on the co-op bridge, since there is little else productive that they foresee #2 doing. The opposing alliance on the other hand doesn't care, since as long as they can push it or be pushed by it up the bridge, it's valid.
This is a shortcoming because of how the co-op rules work. just attempting to balance is a guaranteed point, and a balance is 2 guaranteed points.
In addition, the odds are in favor of the box-bots, since unlike non-box teams that will only have a box alliance member only some of the time, box teams will ALWAYS have a partner that is boxed, that being themselves. Therefore, the chances of getting at least the one point of attempt points are much, much greater and far more consistent for box bots than non-box bots.
With co-op points so valuable, this occurs:
(% of maximum possible)
1.
Wins: 0%
Balances: 0%
Failed Attempts: 100%
Seeding points: 25%
2.
Wins: 0%
Balances: 50%
Failed Attempts: 50%
Seeding points: 37.5%
3.
Wins: 25%
Balances: 50%
Failed Attempts: 50%
Seeding points: 50%
4.
Wins: 0%
Balances: 100%
Failed Attempts: 0%
Seeding points: 50%
5.
Wins: 50%
Balances: 50%
Failed Attempts: 0%
Seeding points: 50%
Cases 1-4 were common Boxbot occurrances. Case 5 was a common average bot occurance. As one can see, all a boxbot would need would be a few lucky pairing to get some win points tossed in and all of the sudden they are picking alliances.
IIRC there have been regionals where the #1 seed actually WAS a boxbot... they used the above effect to rack up massive amounts of seeding points.
The reason this is such a problem is that while co-op balancing is fruitful in Qualification, in eliminations it is useless. The only things boxbots can do in eliminations is either balance or play defense, which most non-box bots can also do. What that means is trhat if you get picked by a boxbot captain, you have in a way been given a large hurdle if not a kiss of death. IMHO this is not good game design and this needs to be fixed for IRI.