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First Principles
Posted by Dodd Stacy.
Engineer on team #95, Lebanon Robotics Team, from Lebanon High School and CRREL/CREARE.
Posted on 8/31/99 3:08 PM MST
In Reply to: Re: statistical bonus points posted by P.J. Baker on 8/31/99 10:43 AM MST:
I think PJ has it. The game's the same for everyone, and we all know what the rules are. I hope FIRST will keep their focus on the larger objectives of the program, and that requires exponential growth for the foreseeable future. We've said it here before: that means media, spectators, and lots of local competition. I personally think that transparent scoring is essential to sustain excitement for all parties. Complex scoring rewards a team with a sharp scorekeeper/strategist when the general level of robot execution competance is primitive across the field. Those days are gone. The sophistication level of many machines today is amazing, and the teams who master them can ring up perfect multiplied or exponential scores. Random elements of the game though can punish severely, too, leading to cries of unfair.
I would urge FIRST to design games that have transparent scoring and balance the incentives for robot offense and defense, while keeping the human player influence from dominating the game. I would also urge FIRST to design games and rules suitable for playing on a basketball court, without tearing it up. This would mean games with NO tipping over, and NO marking the floor - different, but just a new set of rules for everyone. With the benefit that local school on school matches could leverage off the basketball season - instant spectators and student body identification with the school's FIRST team, which I suspect is as lacking at other schools as it is at ours.
Finally, at the risk of irritating a lot of you, I think this angst over seeding is short sighted. FIRST is straining at the seams to give all the teams, especially at the Nationals, an adequate chance to play yet still manage the length of the tournament. Everybody got to play their 6 qualification matches this year, nobody got bumped for good by one match loss or two. Then the field gets narrowed for the Eliminations, with the alliance choosing correcting the process imperfections a bit. We discuss perfecting the process 4 months later, but this is a moving target. The issue doesn't change. How will FIRST adapt the competition to exponential growth in the number of teams? The answer this year, with 200+ teams in Orlando, was 4 teams on the court and downselecting for a single elimination tournament via qualiers. Can we tweak the scoring system to make it work next year with 300 teams? 400? FIRST is on the knee of its exponential. What does it look like with 2000 teams?
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