[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

It's a lot easier to come to a consensus as a team if you make sure you're all starting from the same premise. If everyone on the team is dedicated to building a simple, effective robot that plays a particular strategy, everyone will converge on the optimal solution based on prototyping. We have formally had a six-member "design committee" (half students, half mentors) that picks the direction of the robot, but really it's just kind of a natural process that comes out of prototyping and vision from the lead design people on the team. We had a poor year for robot design when we voted in 2010. We stopped voting and haven't looked back, and with adequate pre-season training no decision has been controversial anyway.

Your post reminded me of something one of my profs in grad school said... Individuals are great at finding a local max in a given solution space, but groups are much better at finding the global max. In other words, individuals might each find different solutions to a problem that can't be incrementally improved on (local max, where any change would decrease the quality of the solution), but those solutions may not be the absolute optimal solution to the problem (the global max, where there is no better solution to the problem).