[fox46]

I along with many of the students on our team have been shocked by the commonality of the machines this year but also thrilled that ours is seemingly very different. By the end of the first weekend we had our concepts prototyped, partially integrated and working in the carcass of last year's practice bot which left us mostly immune from the effects of Ri3D. The result is a machine which looks quite different from everything else I've seen posted on CD thus far.

It is my strong belief that teams are taking "the easy way out" and mimicking Ri3D which I feel does not foster creativity or innovation as well as being left on one's own to brainstorm and design. Even some very strong teams have shown up with extremely complicated mechanisms and processes to pickup and shoot the ball which just seem incongruent with their usual solutions.

On the other hand though, I have always maintained that a good idea today is better than a great idea tomorrow because with a little time to tweak and tune, the good design can often be made to be great. In this sense I can see the merit in taking someone's design and improving upon it however, this year I think there were much better ways to pull off the game tasks which simply have not been explored by most teams.