I have some more comments on the subtleties of collaboration that I will post later. But I do have one thought about the "full-blown" version of collaboration (to the point of co-design and co-building) that has caused all the uproar, and I am very surprised that this has not come up anywhere in the various discussions so far.
As a COMPETITOR, I just absolutely LOVE the fact that these two teams have essentially built the same machine this year, and I hope they continue to do so forever! Why? Because they have just made my job 50% easier!
Huh?
OK, here goes. Every year I get to praise the heavens because our team rarely has to go up against 254 and 60 (thank goodness they are on the wrong side of the country!). Their solutions to the game are always so good, and so creative, that we have to spend a very great amount of time trying to figure out how to defeat them should we ever oppose them in a match (the same can be said for Team Hammond, Chief Delphi, Team 122, and many others). When considering these two teams, we always had to come up with two counter-strategies, develop two sets of plays, practice two sets of scenarios, etc. **
But now, if we can figure out how to beat one of them, then we know how to beat the other. We get twice the benefit for half the work! Everyone posting concerns about how closely teams have collaborated has intimated the result of the collaboration will always be an unbeatable machine. I am not convinced that is the case. We have seen in the past that every "unbeatable" machine has a weakness, and it is just a matter of exploiting it (e.g. even the mighty Beatty Machine in 2002 lost a few rounds). The result of teams collaborating (to the point of co-designing) may be better machines, but I am a long way from assuming they will be unbeatable (or even the "best" machines). Given that, our job is to look for the weaknesses in the design - and if we find it, then we can "kill two birds with one stone."
A concern was expressed earlier in the thread about what would happen if five or ten teams all worked together to build identical machines. Well, they would build ten identical machines, with ten implementations of the same strengths. But they would also have ten copies of the same weaknesses. If we can find it, we have just figured out how to defeat ten teams all at once. So if I hear about ten teams that want to get together, my only response will be "BRING IT ON!
"
At the end of the day, I think that the off-the-playfield ramifications of the "full-blown collaboration" are a very positive thing, for the reasons stated in the FIRST answers, and many others. As a potential competitor ON the play field, I like it even more!
-dave
** note: a few times in past years, our response strategy has been to build a machine that falls apart before we can ever compete against these guys, and we therefore avoid the entire issue altogether - perhaps not the brightest strategy, but hey, it works for us!
