Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by G27

Strategies aimed at and/or game play resulting in the damage, destruction or inhibition of opponent ROBOTS via actions such as high-speed or repeated, aggressive ramming, attachment, damage, tipping, or entanglement of ROBOTS are not allowed.

Violation: FOUL. If strategic, TECHNICAL FOUL. and Potential YELLOW CARD

I'm fine with this change, provided that the "via actions such as" clause applies to everything (which I think it does).

The enforcement logic goes something like this:

1. There's a judgment call to be made: did one of those actions take place? (And while there is ambiguity, the rule clearly grants sufficient latitude to make nearly any judgment difficult to contest.)
2. Then there's a fairly straightforward visual determination: did damage/destruction/inhibition occur as a result?
3. Then another judgment call: was it strategic?

A team with a purposely-frangible robot has control over item 2, but item 1 is substantially harder to manipulate (without building a terrible robot). So I'm not especially concerned about teams gaming the rule.

Item 3 is purely an assessment of intent, which is difficult in questionable cases. But the option to just call a foul is the easy way out: if the referee is unsure, the offence can still be penalized without having to make an unfounded assumption about motive. (And I think that was the point.)