Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitchhiker 42
On the other hand, there is a thing called confirmation bias. To some extent, I think we're all trying to stretch next year's game based on patterns that might not actually exist.
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I certainly do not mean to question/contradict the claims from FIRST HQ that there is no pre-determined pattern. However, the ball-placement-ball-bizarro pattern has held for nearly five cycles (or a bit over five cycles if you allow that at the time, Toroid Terror was a bizarro thing) and is due for bizarro. Since its first appearance in 2004, the "robot pullup" postgame has appeared every third year for five appearances. Every even year has had solid-surface balls as the main game piece going back to 1992, and since the first introduction of a game piece which was not a solid surface ball in 1997, only one year had solid-surface-balls as the game piece, and it was the one and (so far) only non-competitive 4v0 2001 Diabolical Dynamics.
I believe that these patterns are examples of "emergent behavior". Emergent behavior in the natural world includes such things as atoms, molecules, crystals, convection, turbulence, life, tropical storm systems, the ENSO (El-Nino Southern Oscillation), tectonic plates, planets, stars, galaxies, and galactic clusters. None of these are obvious from the fairly simple laws of physics, but they all result from them. Likewise, I believe that the patterns we see are the result of the GDC's general desire to keep the challenges changing from one year to the next, and to keep teams (particularly students) from seeing a problem that they saw recently.
On the matter of "obstructions", it appears that the GDC treats this as a secondary (or tertiary) consideration. Still, it does appear that they try to not do the same thing over and over.
Looking at all of this, and making some SWAGs (Scientific Wild A$$ Guesses) as to how the patterns will continue, here's my call:
Bizarro game: 85+%. That is, there will be some completely new attribute to the 2017 game that will make many/most teams ask "How the *!$% do we do that?" on kickoff day. Previous examples have included Frisbees (and a multi-stage climb), regolith, tetras, 4V0, and (back in 1997) the first-ever non-ball game pieces.
Solid-surface Ball game: < 15%. The last odd-year solid-surface ball game was 2001. 'Tain't likely, Fibber!'
Robot-pullup endgame: < 20%. We just did this.
As far as the "theme" of the game, I definitely expect one. FIRST has done all of the same things as last year (partner with Disney, and have a "teaser" rather than a "game hint"). I expect that we will not have a game hint (which always were clues to the NAME of the game, not its content), but a teaser in which we will be supplied with the game theme and name, but nothing clear as to what will be required to play the game.
On that last point, the only element of the 2016 game hint video that might have been a clue to the game dymanics was the darkening of the sky and the brightening of the lights on the robot warrior. The value of robot-mounted cameras was certainly significant, but not as strong as many of the predictions, which would have had the robots working inside a tower or other construction, completely out of sight of the drivers. The obstructions to vision, bad as they were, were not as bad as the CD predictions.