Team 548 Einstein Statement

[EricH]

Originally Posted by linuxboy

While that does not mention the FTA, it is the closest thing I could find to how an official interaction is made concerning the results of a match. I'm not saying this would have affected how staff reacted but I'd like to point out that, from my interpretation of that rule, the proper way for the mentor to bring this up at the field is not at all. If (s)he wanted, (s)he could have revealed this vulnerability to a team member, the team member would have stood in the question box and voiced these concerns with to the Head Referee, who would (hopefully) confer with the technical staff present, and things could have played out differently. I'm not saying they necessarily would have, but we do have rules about who engages field staff, it clearly indicates that only pre-college students may do so, and I know, when I'm volunteering on the field, I would rather talk to a student than a mentor.

You are forgetting one thing: T14 ONLY addresses Ref interaction! So your interpretation is that the head ref is the only person on the field that questions can be asked of. Have you or any member of your drive team asked a field resetter anything? How about discussing why your robot isn't connecting with the FTA or FTAA? I'm so sorry, but by your interpretation, you just did something illegal. Move along, you can't discuss that with that person.

Now, would it have been helpful to send a message by that route? Maybe--but that involves a) finding a student who isn't trying to fix something and b) having said student wait until they could get the head ref's attention. Then the head ref has to decide that it's important enough to call the FTA or FTAA away from whatever he's doing (probably trying to fix the problem with 118, in the case of 548's matches), oh and did I mention that by now it's second-or third-hand informationsuspicion (which, if you're paying attention, you may have figured out that that's roughly equivalent to a rumor). In other words, chances are fairly high that going that route you'll either be ignored, or if you do get through, the FTA will want to talk to the originator (in this case, the mentor), and we're right back where we started.


@DampRobot: I didn't pick up the implication of a second person involved in the official report. I got that only from 548's account. Also, a 3 second attack like that one would result in needing to reconnect the wifi, which can take a little bit of time, regardless of if there's another attacker or not. I think a lot of the questions you have are going to be very difficult to answer without putting people under suspicion of cheating or of total ignorance, either of which I'm reluctant to do.