[mathking]

A couple of thoughts on robot quality this year. The first is that a LOT of teams lost a LOT of time to the weather. I know that if we had gotten even 1 or 2 of the days we lost back we would have been much better off on the first day and as a result through the whole competition. For example, we had good code to make the robot track and move to the light, but never got a chance to get the arm working with the tube to make trying to score in autonomous worth the risk.

The second is that this game was, from a game theoretic standpoint, much harder than Triple Play. Everyone trying to score on the same object and any interaction with that object making it tougher to score. In Triple Play there were nine places to score so it was much easier to get out of the way of defenders. Also, a lot of the "scoring many tetras" phenomenon was due to the fact that you could carry multiple tetras.

The structure of the field this year made it much easier to team up in defense. And the fact that some bots were ramp only bots made it even easier to play defense. If you only have 1 or 2 opponents trying to score ringers defending is easier. At Pittsburgh it became apparent that there was a HUGE advantage to having two scoring bots (no matter what height at which they could score) because it complicated defense.

I do think that too many teams tried to do too much. But it seemed like we also had a bigger percentage of rookie teams at Pittsburgh than usual. I guess from the numbers, there were close to 300 rookies this year? Is that more than usual? We fell into the "did too much" category somewhat, although we tried to have ramps and an arm because we have a pretty large team and it gave more people something to do. When we were over weight at the regionals, we ditched the ramps and put on some ballast, exactly as our contingency plan dictated. And we didn't lose any build time because of the ramp.