900's Championship Cheesecaking Chronicles

[Joe Johnson]

A lot has been said. Sorry for not participating in this thread during the day as it progressed. What follows is a long post. Sorry in advance. Skip to the RANT Section if you just want to see an old man yell, "get off my lawn"

Originally Posted by marshall

I'm going to take your comment with the spirit in which I think you meant it and not as an insult. Saying "no disrespect" and then "horror show" in the same sentence does not come off as respectful. I don't think you meant it that way and I think I know what you meant.

<snip>

I said horror show, I meant it.

I don't say anything about your kids or your team. In fact, while watching Einstein, I leaned over to my son and said, "As much as I think cheesecaking is bad for FIRST, those kids are going to have a story to tell that will be recounted at ever class reunion they have for the next 70 years."

That said, the story and it's implications ARE fantastically scary more on that below.

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

<snip> So far, I've found it impossible to come up with a rule wording that can draw the line clearly at a certain amount of cheesecaking
<snip>
I don't see how we can make it a plain black and white difference.
<snip>

Originally Posted by George Nishimura

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They tried to ban it. It just happens to be an incredibly difficult thing to outlaw and had to leave it as a loophole.

We don't have to make it as black and white as most people seem to think. FIRST is a great community. Given the nature of the community, I think it can be handled quite simply with a statement of principle and a rule:

STATEMENT (put in a blue box in the rules if you like):

We expect Alliance Captains to pick teams for the robot that a drafted team HAS, not for the robot Alliance Members can turn it into. Small improvements, code changes, tweaks and turns are par for the course as are discovering that a subsystem designed for one function can be used for another (e.g. can you use that arm to block frisbees? why yeah, I guess I can!). However, adding entire new subsystems and functionality after the draft is not in the spirit of FIRST (especially if such additions require removing other subsystems and functionality in order to meet limits such as weight, size, cost, etc.)

RULE (named for Karthik perhaps?):

Teams must be re-inspected after their last Qualification Match. This inspection is expected to be the last re-inspection that a robot will have for a given tournament. Changes that would typically require a re-inspection will not be allowed without a prior permission from the lead inspector of a competition. Requests for such exemptions should be rare. Actual exemptions should be rarer still and will require very special circumstances to be allowed.

Originally Posted by Libby K

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Of course they 'get' to claim they reached Einstein. They put in more work in one day than I think I've ever seen in my now 15+ years as a FIRST observer.

<snip[/b]

No serious FIRSTer should ever suggest that they didn't get to Einstein. This is settled law as far as I am concerned and even those who think having a 4th robot on an alliance is not a particularly good idea. Team 900 is now and forever will be a full member of the great alliance that came out of Curie and came within a 5 points (that's < 3 uncanned totes!) of making it to the Finals on Einstein.

That said, I don't know where you have been looking for 15+ years, Libby K, but there are a lot of folks in the FIRST community who might dispute statements revolving around amounts of work done in a day. They worked hard, I am sure. Good on them. Had they done no work at all in St. Louis, my views on the matter would be the same. How much work they did or didn't do have nothing to do with what is good for FIRST in the long term.

Now for the rant:

I think that FIRST holds a lot of the blame here.

Three years ago they allowed all manner of things to be strapped to robots as blockers for full court disk shooters. Last year, the game design almost forced this because it required two good robots (a.k.a. the #1 seed and the first draft pick) to not be able to win unless the last team drafted (a.k.a. the 24th best team at a tourney) did at least SOMETHING that qualified as an "assist". These two years got the cheesecake snowball rolling.

But THIS year, this year was something special. FIRST made a game where two good robots could effectively get max points if and only if they won a battle that was over in a literal blink of an eye... ...during Auton. FIRST designed a game where a half a second into the match, not only didn't the best alliances need a third robot, often having a 24th robot around was a liability - having them do something, anything, only cost them points -- it never helped them. Add to this that Alliances get a 4th robot at the World Championships (not FIRST's best idea imho) and you have a recipe for the Harpoon Bot. It was going to happen.

I think this is bad for FIRST. Not illegal. Not immoral. Just not want we want more of. FIRST should take steps to make it clear that this is not something it supports both in terms of rules and expectations.

Dr. Joe J.