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Unread 04-01-2009, 17:29
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Re: Anybody really dis-like the game?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber View Post
The robot that is literally a box on wheels can beat the precision engineered robot, to me that is NOT inspiration. To me that says to do the bare minimum because anything else is a waste of resources. Any game where a box on wheels is a viable strategy worries me.
Any team that can pour resources onto a machine and have it come out nothing better than a box on wheels worries me! If your machine does the same things as a box on wheels but with precision mill-work and expensive sensors and the whole thing is coated in lexan just for the giggles: congratulations that WAS a waste of resources. You want to talk about entrepreneurship? You want to talk about real-life applications? A check book is not an appropriate brute force tactic in real life, and because of that fact it is reasonable to propose that it probably shouldn't be considered one in FIRST.

This is pretty much about the minimums you design your bot for. A robox is a pretty solid minimum. If you design your robot in the abstract of "how much better does our design do the task at hand than showing up to the match with only a human player" that is a very low minimum. A slightly better minimum is "how much better does our design do at the task at hand than showing up with a robox?" Higher still would be "what will an average team do at the competition and how can we blow that out of the water?" and for the truly ambitious "what will a good team be able to do and how can we top that?" What you shoot for depends a whole lot on what your team feels ready to take on, but if you take on a low minimum threshold for what you consider to be acceptable performance in your design, don't be so shocked when your robot works no better than you designed it to.

You're totally right! A box has a very high performance this game as a minimum. I guess that means it is probably the lowest benchmark you can safely use when designing a good bot because you can already see how many teams are going to try it.
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