The Curious Case of The Litter

[Adam Fowler]

First off, I would like to say that it is not as hard as people think it is to throw litter to the other side of the field, people are just going about throwing in the wrong way. Most people think the answer is throwing the litter as hard as you can will get it across the field when really you want to use about as much force as it takes to wave at somebody. It is also important to bend the litter to make them straight again before throwing however, sometimes a small bend helps so when you hold it to throw it the litter flattens out as opposed to making a downward facing U. At week 0 we had many differrent people who tied out being human player and found that anyone with 20 minutes to spare could learn to throw litter across the field as good as anyone, regardless of strength. Our human players sometimes ended up scoring more than the robots, worse case scenario the litter ended up out of the way in the landfill or the step. For this reason I would say only go for litter in a recycling container if 1. a robot has a specialized mechanism to do so 2. a robot can not stack well but can move a recycling container to the human player station for loading through the litter chute and prepare it for their alliance partners to stack.