Please help Wave Robotics earn $1,000!!!

[Debbie]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

I'll drop a few more in if I the need becomes urgent, but I think the gap is too great to recover. That being said, never take your enemy small. If they get a 30 kid class tomorrow to work at full speed, they could theoretically catch up in around 5 hours. Get a few classes to work on it simultaneously, and they could catch up really quickly.

.

1146505 to 697546 at 1:00 pm est..

Looking good for wave.. but put a shout out on here if it starts to change and I'll mass out to my team and get them voting again... Good luck!

[Navid Shafa]

Well, it's finally over and the results have Wave winning by a landslide. Congratulations!

[Tristan Lall]

So, if a person can deposit 50 coins per minute, and therefore 3 000 per hour (assuming they can work continuously), achieving the million-and-a-half coin total was the equivalent of something like 380 to 400 hours worth of coin-depositing (a.k.a. mindless crap¹).

If you paid a person the minimum wage in Wisconsin ($7.25/h) to do that work for about 390 hours, that would be over $2 800. My conclusion is therefore that we need a way of sending small cash payments to Wave Robotics with minimal overhead—and then we need to convince ChiefDelphi users to stop wasting time and just pay up! The world is better off that way, because those ChiefDelphi users get to donate to a good cause, their employers get the benefit of the hours of labour that underwrites their donations, and the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation gets to keep its money.²

Now, I'm pretty sure this was actually won—and lost for that matter—by programmers and their dueling scripts, so the net loss to society could be smaller than that $2 800 figure. On the other hand, how many of us would be happy at a wage rate of $7.25/h? (I'm thinking that this enlarged the loss to society, given the calibre of participants in this thread.)

So next time someone posts asking you to click on something repeatedly or do some other menial task, and the sheer absurdity of it doesn't dissuade you from helping out, either:

• Automate it out of a combination of expediency and protest. (The problem-solver's solution.)
• Consider that once you've impulsively accepted the "challenge" of dropping virtual coins in a virtual pig as a means of contributing to the team, you'd actually be better off checking if Wave Robotics has a "Donate with Google Checkout" (or other equivalent) button on their webpage.

Actually, the real problem-solver's solution is this: figure out a way to overcome the frictional effects of small financial transactions (e.g. impulse control, authentication, etc.), and account for the (minimal) recreational benefits of playing this game, with the overall objective of making donations as attractive as spending time dropping coins in a pig. That way everyone actually wins.

¹ Full disclosure: Minesweeper is fun too. But I'm deliberately keeping my time-wasting labour to myself, so that nobody knows how much time I'm wasting.
² Practically speaking, I know that income and labour aren't often this granular, but I think the point about more productive uses of labour stands.

[Tyler Olds]

Thank you to all who helped Wave Robotics recieve this $1,000 grant. It is amazing to see how much the CD community came through to help out a fellow team and it will definately not be forgotten. I look forward to seeing many of you at IRI swapping stories of how you "fed the pig".

Thank you once again.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

Now, I'm pretty sure this was actually won—and lost for that matter—by programmers and their dueling scripts, so the net loss to society could be smaller than that $2 800 figure. On the other hand, how many of us would be happy at a wage rate of $7.25/h? (I'm thinking that this enlarged the loss to society, given the calibre of participants in this thread.)

I really hope not. Multiple people (including people from WAVE) posted here that using such scripts simply isn't right. It's cheating, it's likely against the rules of the program and, if caught, would DQ Wave, and finally it's not GP to try to go around the purpose of something like this.

So next time someone posts asking you to click on something repeatedly or do some other menial task, and the sheer absurdity of it doesn't dissuade you from helping out, either:

• Automate it out of a combination of expediency and protest. (The problem-solver's solution.)

While certainly a creative and educational way to tackle the problem, I suggest the next time someone asks you to do something like this, you think of the purpose behind it, the sponsor(s) behind it, and how doing something like that is likely to go completely against the intent and values of the program you are attempting to support.

I certainly encourage people who want to tackle a project like automating something like this to attempt to do so... it's a great educational tool and you'll learn a lot doing it. But to please, please not actually use it.

Big mammoth corporations (Like Activision, for example) have spent millions of dollars combating scripts like those you suggest in their multiplayer games. Pick your favorite online multiplayer game, and think about the repetitive stuff you have to do to improve your character/team/account/whatever. Creating a script to do it for you seems very tempting... but doing so also gives you an unfair advantage over everyone else playing. To equate this to FIRST... it's like a team going into a competition this past year with 6 CIM motors. It's against the rules and gives them an unfair advantage... but if they bury them in the robot so they aren't visible and no one catches them, they win, right?

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by eagle33199

I really hope not. Multiple people (including people from WAVE) posted here that using such scripts simply isn't right. It's cheating, it's likely against the rules of the program and, if caught, would DQ Wave, and finally it's not GP to try to go around the purpose of something like this.



While certainly a creative and educational way to tackle the problem, I suggest the next time someone asks you to do something like this, you think of the purpose behind it, the sponsor(s) behind it, and how doing something like that is likely to go completely against the intent and values of the program you are attempting to support.

I certainly encourage people who want to tackle a project like automating something like this to attempt to do so... it's a great educational tool and you'll learn a lot doing it. But to please, please not actually use it.

Big mammoth corporations (Like Activision, for example) have spent millions of dollars combating scripts like those you suggest in their multiplayer games. Pick your favorite online multiplayer game, and think about the repetitive stuff you have to do to improve your character/team/account/whatever. Creating a script to do it for you seems very tempting... but doing so also gives you an unfair advantage over everyone else playing. To equate this to FIRST... it's like a team going into a competition this past year with 6 CIM motors. It's against the rules and gives them an unfair advantage... but if they bury them in the robot so they aren't visible and no one catches them, they win, right?

Believe me, I'm aware of the issues surrounding cheating in FIRST, and I make a conscious distinction between the obeying the rules in FIRST (and other sports/games), obeying the law in real-life challenges, and obeying nebulous constraints in pointless activities.

In sports, the rules are obeyed because all the participants are aware of the expectations, and follow them. What ideally results is an entertaining spectacle that is representative of the skill of the competitors. I'd tend to put FIRST in this category.

But you mentioned a computer game, and this lends itself to an exploration of some situations where the logic above doesn't completely apply. Under less-than-ideal circumstances, some people will decide that their own experience may be improved by (for example) automating tasks in an RPG. Insofar as that actually ruins the game for others, it's clearly a breach of the expected standards of conduct. But what if the game has potential, but is flawed enough that the only enjoyable way to play it is by making modifications that are not sanctioned by the free-spending developers/publishers? I'd say there's a situation in which it may not be wrong to break the rules, at least from the perspective of the user's experience. (There are other considerations that enter into that example, like copyright, and maybe this question has the potential to spawn a Chit-Chat thread—for now, I introduce this as evidence that it's important to understand why you're following rules, and to be aware that sometimes breaking a rule can be the right thing to do.)

In real life, the laws are obeyed either out of fear of the consequences, or better still, out of trust that they will ensure a more equitable outcome. The implication here is that laws and customs ought to be beneficial to society as a whole, and not unduly exploitative of any of its members.

In an online piggybank, there may be an implied constraint against feeding it in a scripted manner. On the other hand, this contest, even when played straight, provides neither an entertaining spectacle, nor an equitable result—as I described, it's probably a significant net loss to society, because feeding a piggybank is by definition among the least productive uses of labour. And that's to say nothing of the layers of perversity embodied in choosing the winner based on that process. It is clearly open to manipulation, and the organizers of the contest have failed to impose even modest safeguards against that possibility (they didn't even post a conspicuous notice, as they ought to have if this was important to them). It is not representative of the true needs of the community—at best it encourages the two organizations to mobilize their bases of support, and therefore is little but a comparison of the marketing skills of two worthy organizations. (It's not even a popularity contest, because the competitors self-select the majority of the participants.) In fact, intentionally or not, it allows the granting organization to dodge the (more difficult) question of how to allocate resources based on need or merit, instead substituting a quasi-democratic exercise that resembles a vote, but doesn't really have anything to do with the will of the people.

I'll allow the possibility that the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation is of limited capabilities, and is therefore unable to tackle the problem of allocating resources in a reasonable way. In that case, if the only alternative was not to disburse the funds, then sure, a silly Flash game would be better than nothing. But under those constraints, they could just have given $500 to each candidate organization, and moved on. So I can only hope that they're of the belief that by organizing this song and dance, they can counteract the overall negative effect of the program by drumming up enough support to encourage other sorts of contributions to the team—like someone seeing the pig, and thinking, "I could do this so much better if I just wrote the team a cheque". That's why the real solution is to figure out a way to eliminate the middleman, and get the team some money that isn't tainted by hundreds of wasted person-hours.

So, failing that, because this is obviously not a democratic exercise (unless the franchise is actually supposed to be defined by "how many fake coins you can manually deposit into a virtual pig"), is it actually wrong to use a script to automate the process in favour of the organization you believe most worthy? Aren't we just relying on preconceptions of voting behaviour that don't actually apply to piggybanks? And isn't there room for legitimate protest in response to the absurdity of it all? Perhaps something along the lines of causing someone to realize "these million votes from the same IP address can't be real...maybe we ought to re-think our strategy for disbursing funds".

Now of course, it might be better to simply communicate these concerns directly to the donor, rather than engage in a script war. If they're willing to respond on a policy-based level, then you've won the battle without firing a shot.

There's actually one other interesting fact about this particular contest: if you were depositing scripted coins of your own volition, Wave played no part in causing you to do that (except maybe introducing you to the contest). So if Wave got disqualified because of your actions, it would expose another inequity in the competition's design—punishing an innocent party for the sins of another isn't fair. In fact, if you knew this was a potential consequence, you might deposit millions of coins in the "opponent's" piggybank, in the hopes of getting them disqualified. (Malice aforethought probably makes you complicit in the stupidity, but it's an equivalent demonstration of the flawed system.)

And you know what: getting Wave disqualified early in the contest would probably have been a better overall outcome than letting the contest run its course. That would have avoided the waste of the majority of those person-hours, and guaranteed that Emmeline Cook Elementary School would win $1000. Now that's an insane situation: even if you "cheat", and get caught, and get thrown out, society is better off.

[Thermal]

That's some really strong feelings over supposedly using 2800 dollars worth of man hours to produce 1000 dollars for a team. Your argument is so asinine I really cannot begin to fathom why you feel so strongly about it to post essay length rebuttals.

I'll debunk your argument by simply saying that all man-hours are not of equivalent worth, and what people do in their leisure time is their own business.

To finish, i'll leave this here.

"Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!"

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

And you know what: getting Wave disqualified early in the contest would probably have been a better overall outcome than letting the contest run its course. That would have avoided the waste of the majority of those person-hours, and guaranteed that Emmeline Cook Elementary School would win $1000. Now that's an insane situation: even if you "cheat", and get caught, and get thrown out, society is better off.

Tristan, I usually love your posts, but I cease to understand why you care or what you're mad about.

Let those who "wasted" their time doing this worry about themselves. If you didn't feel the need to contribute to helping a team, why are you posting this?

[thefro526]

Congrats to Wave on earning the grant.

I'm glad to see the 10 minutes a day I spent dropping coins in didn't go to waste.

Keep up the awesome.

[DonRotolo]

Sigh. Someone please close this thread.

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by Thermal

That's some really strong feelings over supposedly using 2800 dollars worth of man hours to produce 1000 dollars for a team. Your argument is so asinine I really cannot begin to fathom why you feel so strongly about it to post essay length rebuttals.

I'll debunk your argument by simply saying that all man-hours are not of equivalent worth, and what people do in their leisure time is their own business.

I don't dispute it's a person's right to choose how they spend their leisure hours, and donor's right to disburse their funds within reason. I'm just opining that for all the talk of what's right and wrong, we seem to have forgotten to ask whether this contest is even a responsible way of accomplishing the goals of the donor organization. Just because people are willing to participate doesn't make it a good idea. And conversely, is it always wrong (or even illegal) to fail to honour the ad hoc terms that people invented above?

Since I don't think the Oshkosh Area Community Foundation's goal was to destroy more value than they've created, I think they've erred, even as they write a $1 000 cheque to a good cause. The point is to highlight an opportunity for better fundraising practices, not to castigate individual coin-depositors (who may not consider their actions a waste of time).

(And by the way: if we're talking in economic terms, leisure hours are more valuable than working ones, because you would demand a very high wage to convert that leisure into labour.)

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Tristan, I usually love your posts, but I cease to understand why you care or what you're mad about.

Let those who "wasted" their time doing this worry about themselves. If you didn't feel the need to contribute to helping a team, why are you posting this?

It's like those schemes where someone collects two million pop tabs, and then tries to exchange them for a wheelchair. Even if they do get a wheelchair out of it (and usually they don't), they've wasted so much effort that could have been better applied to something else.

This is just another version of the same sort of problem, except that we're talking labour instead of scrap metal (and in this case, the payout is certain, but in all likelihood smaller than the expenditure).

Originally Posted by DonRotolo

Sigh. Someone please close this thread.

Sorry Don...I wanted to wait until after the fundraising drive had run its course, to avoid the (wholly erroneous) perception that I might be trying to sabotage their efforts. I may have been just a little too forceful in a thread that was expected to soon reach the end of its natural lifespan.

[Thermal]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

(And by the way: if we're talking in economic terms, leisure hours are more valuable than working ones, because you would demand a very high wage to convert that leisure into labour.)

Except in the case where people donated their leisure hours into some pseudo form of labor for this team.

[Debbie]

Congrats Wave!!!!! I'm happy that everyone came together to help you!

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

It's like those schemes where someone collects two million pop tabs, and then tries to exchange them for a wheelchair. Even if they do get a wheelchair out of it (and usually they don't), they've wasted so much effort that could have been better applied to something else.

This is just another version of the same sort of problem, except that we're talking labour instead of scrap metal (and in this case, the payout is certain, but in all likelihood smaller than the expenditure)

This is where I cannot follow your argument.

Sure, maybe if only a few people had spent all that time depositing coins in the piggy bank you can say that those persons couldve been more productive with their time. However, the beauty of the process was that it only required a few minutes from each person in a large group of people to accomplish the same task. Trying to roll all of that time up into collective man hours is in my eyes, apples and oranges.

Many people are more than willing to spend 10 minutes or so doing a task like that to help someone out. That doesn't mean you can take 48 people's collective 10 minutes each, add them together and get an 8 hour day of coin dropping. 1 person simply would not do that for an 8 hour day, which is why I cannot follow your argument.

-Brando

[trilogy2826]

I would like to shore Tyler's thanks to the CD community. Overall, I thought this was a fun and engaging (albeit repetitive) way of awarding a grant. I spent a lot of nights "feeding the pig" while on travel testing robots for my other (not FIRST) job. I chain emailed at least 50 people outside of CD and our team and they in turn passed the word on. At the very least, we cast our FIRST net further than we did before.

To address Tristan's comments: I am with Akash and Brandon so far as being confused by your logic and derisiveness toward this effort. Every year I personally put over $800 cash and easily 500-600 hours of my "leisure time" into Wave Robotics. All of our team members and sponsors donate their cash and energy to different degrees. Almost every fundraiser we have ever done would cost more than we would gain if we were to pay our volunteers even minimum wage. I know from talking to many other teams in the past, this is similar in their estimation. The coin donation effort was no different in this regard than every other effort every team has put into making their team more than just a collection of people.

So why do we do this year after year? Why did CD step up to the plate and help our singular team to get this grant? IMHO, we are all givers to the core. We take solace in the fact that what we are doing provides something, that if it didn't exist, would make our community a worse place.

This reply was not generated to continue an argument. It was generated to exemplify to the CD community how proud I am to be part of FIRST and CD. This entire organization was partially founded on creating something out of nothing and enabling people and eventually the greater society to be more responsible toward their fellow humans.

Again thanks to the CD community for helping in this effort. I encourage every team to go to their local Chamber of Commerce or community involvement center and see what is out there. I would love to see another one of these grant games on CD soon.