Quote:
Originally Posted by Oblarg
I'm currently undecided on whether this rule interpretation is lousy or not, but really, a lot of the theatrics and alarmism in this thread is unbecoming.
People, it is rather difficult to construe this ruling as "anything that interferes with your robot is now illegal." It's not an issue of broad v. narrow reading, a lot of the (rather inane, I think) "well, now <insert common thing here> must also be illegal!" lines of argument simply don't follow at all from the Q&A response without some rather silly mental gymnastics.
Whether intent should factor into robot rules is a valid question with defensible arguments on either side (though I think you'd likely be hard-pressed to eliminate it entirely). But the sky isn't falling, the number of robots this change(?) in interpretation actually applies to is very small, and snarking about how you're going to add a bunch of sensors to your robot so that everyone else's robot is now in violation of the interpretation does not, as far as I can tell, add much to the discussion.
Just my two cents.
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While you may not appreciate extreme examples of a certain interpretation, I think they are important.
These extremes (and more moderate examples) highlight ways that teams can get blindsided by a particular LRI or Head Ref's interpretation of the rule.
Some odd interpretation of R9-A led to us cutting "windows" into our shot blocker at CVR. Thankfully, the effectiveness of our defensive strategy was not compromised. I felt like we were just one small interpretation step away from things going differently at CVR, and having tall blockers eliminated completely.
I appreciate the reactions, they are a result of many minds working and analyzing every aspect of this year's challenge.
I think that is pretty cool.
-Mike