[Joe Johnson]

The rule does not say "#4) the alliance with the most of ITS robots in scoring position" but rather "#4) The alliance with the most robots in scoring position"

I believe that this is intended to imply that you should count the number of robots that are in each alliance's robot scoring zone and the alliance with the highest number wins the tiebreaker. But as Raul-the-magnificent so clearly points out, this condition will never break a tie because the earlier tie breakers would have already broken the tie if the number of robots is unequal (so that either you never get to tie breaker number 4 or if you do, the number of robots in each alliance's robot scoring zone is equal so it does not break the tie after all! The rule might as well be written as "we didn't like the number 4 so we decided to skip tie breaker number 4 and proceed right to tie breaker number 5, though we knew we would get a lot of questions if we didn't have SOMETHING in the number 4 slot so we have written a tie breaker that will never actually be used to break a tie in order to placate the all the small minded 'linear thinkers' in the FIRST community" ;-)

Anyway, the point is pretty moot. I cannot imagine a team actually COUNTING on this tie breaker as a means of winning a match (even if my interpretation is wrong and it really matters how many of my alliance's robots are in scoring position).

Even if I am wrong and a team CAN cut the score so fine that they really need to have this tie breaker to plan their strategy, I suppose that FIRST will clarify it soon enough for all concerned.


Joe J.