The Highest Levels of Play

[Kevin Leonard]

Back on topic- I think a better title for this thread would be- "How do you get the game right early on?
How do you figure out what robots you'd see on the World Championship and IRI Championship alliances?

I'll use this year as an example:
I believed at the beginning of build season the highest levels of play would compose of: Landfill Stacker, HP Stacker, Capper.
No alliance would ever end up with more than 7 cans, which I believed a high-tier capper could manage to place all of, or at least most of. I figured the best human player stackers could make 4-5 uncapped stacks, and the best landfill stackers would be able to do the same.

What I failed to see is that while that could be effective in theory, so could three robots building stacks underneath cans.

When running human trials, we tried building stacks underneath cans and had the cans fall over and the humans couldn't carry the stacks well.

How do you account for the difference in what robots are able to do vs. what humans are able to do? Robots do some things faster than humans, while humans do some things faster than robots.