[David Brinza]

I tend to think of FIRST's spirit of "cooperative competition" as the comraderie that exists among teams working toward a fair competition. As an example, teams will gladly share tools, parts, expertise in the pits to help another team in need to make their robot competitive. I doubt any team's reasonable request for such assistance would be refused by a FIRST team able to help out.

I spoke with the player who admitted he came up with the idea and his rationale was one of "cooperation" among teams. I told him that the "cooperation" was only to the benefit of the 4 teams involved in the match, while the other 30+ teams were put at a distinct disadvantage. Since his team employed this strategy in a few subsequent matches, the "cooperation" then become a benefit to his team.

I saw another team attempting to utilize this strategy - you should have seen the reaction by their human player when an opponent's robot autonomously rammed the tall stack he'd just created.

Lesson learned: autonomous robots do not make agreements!!