The Paradox of Cycling

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Orion.DeYoe

If you were to run some calculations at the beginning of the season you will see that picking up frisbees (in the case of 2013) is a lot faster than going to the feeder station every time. However in practice a cycling robot often outscores a pickup robot.

I'd like to see these calculations. We certainly didn't figure it this way, and I'm with Adam--I doubt it was an overly common assumption, even ignoring the novel difficulty of disc pickup. Certainly it's possible to setup such calculations to accurately reflect the floor/feeder comparison. Further, despite the similarities in basic description, the strategic usefulness and tradeoff of floor pickup in 2013 is nothing like 2012 or indeed 2011.

In addition to noting the multiple differences in field layout, I'm sure we're not the only team this year that experimented extensively with getting discs any consistent useful distance from the HP station. Unfortunately (and surely deliberately), this wasn't possible the way it was in 2012. The corollary is equally important: good HPs (or good robots, e.g. 16) could roughly co-locate quite a few game pieces in 2012. In terms of execution, this is the main bottleneck in floor strategies.