Team 548 Einstein Statement

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Astrokid248

You wouldn't necessarily have to know the cause of the issue to happen upon the exploit. With the growing number of applications that can control any number of robots with a smartphone, it's really not surprising that between week 4 and Einstein someone whipped out a phone and thought, "What if I connect in during a match?"

It's the "1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters" postulate at work, and I think it would be wise of FIRST to challenge all teams to try and find these exploits and notify FIRST as they appear. Crowd-source the troubleshooting of these systems, and allow teams to have active feedback throughout the season. It would solve a lot of problems. And I agree with the idea that FIRST should have some kind of pre-written response to let teams know that emails are at least going through.

I agree with you--in "1000 people" [likely more] that were around fields on/after Week 4, it seems somewhat plausible to me that someone else who happened to have 5GHz WiFi happened to try to connect to a robot who happened to have Revision A, and happened to try entering a password and cause FCA, and happened to be one of the people that would keep it to themselves. Not likely, but plausible.

What I find significantly less plausible is that FIRST officials happened to do so. Not only is the sample size many, many times smaller, but they are naturally quite busy during matches and additionally have every reason to trust in FIRST's testing. (I acknowledge the potential for complacency.) I cannot picture an FTA or FTAA (etc), much less Dean or Woodie, whipping out their phone in the middle of a match. They have every reason to be among the most busy people in the stadium and no reason to distrust their own selections. This is my argument against DampRobot's question of institutional knowledge.