Quote:
Originally Posted by Arefin Bari
By the way, did FIRST ever email us the hints in previous years or were they given to us in other form?
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I believe '05 and '06 were emailed.
After reading through all 16 pages, here's what I think:
First of all, I'm not completely ruling out the coordinates. It may be an obvious hint, but clearly interpreting it has proven to be very difficult. Keep in mind, Woodie works at MIT, right across the river from the coordinates given. Maybe Dave was visiting Woodie and happened to notice the Hancock building. Though many buildings throughout the world use sway dampers, I think the Hancock tower represents FIRST engineering quite well. They built a tower, realized there was a problem, and solved it with an innovative solution. We build robots, get to competition, and find innovative solutions to problems we were not expecting. In the past (alluding to Dave's signature), especially 2005, swaying has been a huge problem for some teams. The third number could be the height of the counterweight in the tower (I'm too tired to check right now).
As for the song idea,
"Sometimes the light's all shining on me
Other times I can barely see"
Tracking the light with the CMU cam
other times, tracking IR (invisible to the human eye)
The one question that has been bothering me all along has been "why six decimal places?" The coordinates justify the accuracy, but height? The only thing I've seen a number of times with six decimal places of accuracy has been atomic mass... I checked, and no elements have any of those numbers as their mass. Maybe isotopes... Spelling words with elements? Masses of compounds, enthalpy and entropy? I had a chem test today...
Seriously though, what applications would use numbers that accurate? The Heading seems to point directly to the globe cafe. Maybe there's a hint in there. I've been racking my brain for hours now. Time to get some sleep