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#13
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Re: Cooperation is in the "Spirit of FIRST"
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Thank you for a great event. Your committee did a wonderful job. On this subject, I would like to request, if you haven't done so, that you read the other posts on this subject. I have talked to other people who, at first look, thought that this "cooperation" of teams was a good thing. However, the game this year is not a 4 team cooperative game. The expectation is that teams are competing 2-on-2. When they start to make agreements with their opponents, they are violating the basic agreements per the Kickoff on how the game is to be run. Taken to it's extreme, we would have all 4 teams choregraphing exactly what each robot will do to achieve the highest possible points. Picture the human players making 8 high stacks and the robots taking exactly their share of the bins, and then heading up to the top with everyone making room for each other. Well the 45th bin would have to be pushed out. Now we have a maximum score for each team. Well everyone else will get the same score if they do that. Why did we go through days of lack of sleep if we are all going to get the same score? That is not a 2-on-2 competition. In other situations of FIRST, we applaud teams cooperating and helping each other, and rightly so. However when we are supposed to be competing, it is not okay to then start working with your opponents and thus change the game to a version of 2001. We need to be operating on the same page. Example: In a doubles match of tennis, the partners cooperate against their opponents. They do not cooperate with their opponents, but they could. They could say, guys, we are tired so let's make this an easy match. We will let you win the first set by 6 games to 0 and you let us win the second one. That way we will only have to play 12 games. Then we will really play hard in the third set. No harm to anyone, right? Wrong. It harms the other teams because they are competing as expected and will be more tired. They expect a level playing field. That is all we are asking for here. If we are going to make the game like 2001, well let's design it that way. But FIRST abandoned that format last year, for good reason. Watch the 2002 kickoff where Dean discusses this. Cooperation is wonderful, except when the basic concept of a game is competition. Then cooperation between opponents is wrong because it is not what was agreed upon. It is a fundamental violation of the agreements of the game, whether it is stated in the rules or not. Are there rules forbidding tennis opponents from making agreements? I don't know, but I do know that anyone doing that would not be competing long, and there would soon be rules against it if it were done, because it just isn't fair. See the FIRST forum for their response to the question as to whether it is okay or not for teams to make agreements with their opponents. We were called together for a 2-on-2 competition and put unbelievable effort into creating our robots so we could get points in the match. To have teams then decide to leave up huge stacks on both sides with no effort to knock them down and no one protecting them, is to create a phony competition. They are really working together to beat all the other teams. Well then everyone would have to do that and that is the real problem. That would look really stupid on NASA channel, and as Dean said this year, we want to make the game more audience friendly. Are we going to have baseball games where the teams have agreed to pitch softly? No because no one would come, and no one will come to fake FIRST games either. I have parents who flew in from Los Angeles to watch the match who were upset by the pretense of the teams, who had obviously made agreements between them. That is dishonest if you are supposed to be opponents. It is absolutely necessary for us to separate the wonderful cooperation in the pits and on this forum as examples, from when teams are opponents in a game. If there are no opponents, there isn't a game and that is what we have to avoid. I am sorry but I couldn't ask my volunteer engineers to come day after day, sometimes sleeping on floor when they got tired, to then put on a theatrical performance of choregraphed robots, unless that was the agreed upon format as in 2001. What the fuss is about is that I care very much about FIRST and feel that this behavior threatens it. When I heard a mentor on Friday at the Arizona Regional say that their team was voting on whether to withdraw from the competition, I think that is serious. Let's just agree on what game we are playing, 2-on-2, or a cooperative 4 team game, and then stick to it. As for the petition that we are asking people to sign, it is really just an effort to come to an agreement on the format: 2-on-2 or cooperative 4. See http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=19301 I think the sooner that it is made clear what the format is, the sooner we can all get on with other matters. I was told by Jason Morella of FIRST that FIRST does watch this forum. I am requesting that all teams who are in favor of keeping the 2-on-2 format post a message on the above thread that pre-match agreements between opponents should not occur. If people really want to change to a 4 team cooperative format, they can start a thread for that. We just have to settle it one way or the other. Best regards, Last edited by DougHogg : 17-03-2003 at 18:54. |
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