[Ken Leung]

Just a little background on the thread.

It was started right after kickoff at 2001, when the game Diabolical Dynamics was introduced to the teams.

The concept of that year's competition is that there will be 4 robots on one alliance, all working together on the field to get the highest possible score under the time limit. The tricky thing is, the earlier you "finish" the match by pushing all the stop buttons, the higher a score multiplier you get. It was a rush of working with alliance partners, deciding which robot do which task on the field, and trying to get all 4 e-stop button pressed as soon as possible.

During the qualification rounds, the robots will be paired with 3 random partner, play the match and score as much as possible. It was different but similar in the finals. The way the finals worked was, 2 alliances will be competing against each other trying to score the high points to advance. So, you would see alliances coming back with a higher score after their opponents' new high school, and go back and forth trying to top each other.


The most important debates for that year's game were:

Is it exciting for spectators to watch?
Is it challenging for teams to participate in?
Is head to head better?

You can see some of those debates in the thread above.


That game was the first year I went to Manchester for kickoff. You may notice that in Remember that thread? #1 about the prank by Dr. Joe was posted right before that kickoff. You can imagine his face when he saw the big balls in the 01' game, since similar balls were mentioned in his prank.

That year was also very interesting for me, because I've only done the 99' and 00' competitions, and they were both head to head competitions. The philosophy of all teams working together was new to me, and to everyone else in the competition. We didn't know what to expect when everyone was used to having "enemies" on the field instead of all "partners".

The hard part was, every team thinks they are best at balancing the goals on the bridge, and there were a lot of arguments on the field before the match. The fact that teams only know their partners 10 mins before the matches didn't help at all.

At the end, I remember some positive things came out of that competition:

Both veteran and rookie teams could do well in that game.
There were a lot of varieties of machines.
Teams learn to work with other teams much better, a lot of friendships were built because of that year, and the atmosphere of collaboration grew much stronger as a result.
The game was fun to build a robot for.
The e-stop was introduced the first time that year.


What do you think? ;-)