Losing on Purpose to Gain Advantage

[Alan Anderson]

"The purpose of the qualification matches is to allow each TEAM to earn a seeding position that may qualify them for participation in the elimination matches."

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Note the usage of "TEAM" rather than robot. That's continued in the rest of Section 5.

I accept the correction without complaint. So my reasoning is based on the idea that qualification matches are intended to rank teams according to their ability to play the game. The other viewpoint is that qualification matches are an opportunity for a team to explicitly manipulate the seeding positions of the teams involved in order to participate in the elimination matches, right? I understand that viewpoint, but I reject it because of the words "qualify them for participation". I interpret that to mean "seed high" rather than to mean "get picked by a high seed".

Why is game theory disallowed for a team to use? Game theory plays an awfully large role in strategy decisions. Should we prevent teams from strategizing with their alliance partners before each match as well, so we can simply see which robots execute the tasks the best?

Strategy for a match is fine with me. The word "alliance" is a good hint that teams are expected to work together during the match. What I have a problem with is "gaming the play" at the expense of playing the game. I strongly prefer using the rankings as a measure of performance rather than as an explicit goal.

Hindsight is 20/20, but did the blue alliance (or 71 specifically) do anything that you would perceive as "wrong" by not "trying their hardest" to win match 2? By not calling a back-up bot or fielding a partially functioning robot?

Elimination matches do not participate in the seeding process and are outside the scope of my participation in this discussion.