[Ash]

Hello everyone. I'm just waking up from the jet lag caused by the return trip back here (Florida). Boy is it a killer.

Well, it seems that everyone is getting all upset about some high scores or something or other. I would like to clarify a few points that walesjd might have left out when he posted. Seeing as how I'm the base driver, I am also a bit better suited to say what was going on with the robot anyway.

First of all, I admit that at the UCF Regional, our drive team wanted to work with the opposing team to get a high score. We succeeded, but only for a short while, until our score was surpassed by others. However, to the best of my knowledge, we tried that only once, and nothing of the sort was commited when we successfully defended an 8 stack (if you want proof, go to Soap108 and download the match).

Second of all, it was early in the competition in Seattle that I realized how to score big, without "colluding" with the opposing alliance. Anyone who would have watched from the stands would have thought I was working with the other alliance, since it was so different from what all the other teams were doing. I knew that our robot could get to the wall before almost all the other robots at Seattle, so since I would be on our side of the field when the robot control period began, I would protect the higher of our two stacks. And that was it. Granted, I would occasionally stop other robots from descoring boxes, when I felt the stack was safe enough. But I never knocked down the opposing alliance's stack if my stack was still standing.

In fact, to other teams it may have even seemed like we were working together. That is because out of all the other matches I saw (excluding the last few in the finals) no one ever cared about the human player stacks. They were all concerned about making sure the opponent didnt get any points. I even saw a match where the two red robots were disabled, and the blue robots not only knocked down the red stacks, but proceeded to clear every single box out of the red scoring zone.

Dean Kamen does not think of games that are as easy as "get to the top of the ramp" or "knock over the stack". The games always have depth; they always have different ways of playing. The game can even change for the finals. But that is what makes the FIRST games great. They don't have only one method of play.

Now I don't know how I'm going to end this post, so I'm just going to to say this: I am proud of my high UNAJUSTED score of 233, and I am proud of my win at the Seattle regional. If you want to know why, ask someone who was there.