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Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday
So are you suggesting that I cannot continue to develop software for my job at Motorola?
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No, I'm not. Allow me to elucidate my point:
Software development for one robot is software development for all similar robots.
Call it Verdeyen's law. Or the transitive property of code, whatever floats your goat.
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Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday
Personally I think changing the software for your practice robot would be fine, just as you could modify it mechanically, as long as you did not bring that updated software with you to the competition (just like you could not bring your updated mechanical piece to the competition).
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It might sound hackneyed, but in software, unlike mechanical parts, the process is the product. Say your team troubleshoots drive code on your practice robot, and spends 100 hours trying different things that
just... won't... work. Until, sometime around hour 110, someone sees the light, and realizes that you need to use Newtons instead of pounds, they already know the answer. So next week, when you go to competition, you're already 111 hours into the software development process, and you have the answer in your pocket. That's outside of both the spirit and the letter of the rule.
If you still think that's legal, then tell me where you would draw the line. Can the programmers bring the new code to the competition on a laptop, or does the code need to be on a disk? Or would it be better if they just had a printout of the code, and re-typed it? Maybe not the actual code, what if it was just a flowchart that showed them what they needed to write, and they re-wrote the actual functions from scratch?
If you don't draw the line at no robot software development, you have nowhere else to draw the line.
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Originally Posted by Dave Flowerday
It seems like a lot of people are trying to read a lot more into that rule than is necessary.
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It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to read a lot less into the rule than what it says.