[Kevin Sevcik]

Cromat,

That only works if your definition of fairness is "equal chance to get to Champs, sort of." Probably the better definition to move toword would be "equal chance to build a good robot."

It's a very very complicated issue. Teams with more members will inevitably have better odds than teams with few members. Teams with better shops will inevitably have better ability to do more with less materials than other teams. Teams with more money will still be able to iterate through more designs than other teams.

So basically, what you're trying to do is find an optimized solution that maximizes fairness and creative potential, and minimizes draconian rules. Now if someone can actually come up with a good equation for that, the solution becomes a trivial numerical problem to solve....