Old Man Notices A Thing: Lots of Robot Names

[Karibou]

When I was a student on 1189, we named our robots, alternating between male and female names/robots, trying to relate the name to the game, and we tried to go in alphabetical order. This particular practice was short-lived: it started in 2006 and ended in 2010. It was important to us to pick names that would work easily in conversation and would make us feel like we were talking about an actual person.

2006: Balzac (don't remember the story behind this one)
2007: Charlotte (after the spider in Charlotte's Web, makes sense for the game)
2008: Atlas (technically after this guy, but we also had a lot of Ayn Rand readers on the team that year...) (alphabetically out of order)
2009: Diana (goddess of the moon)
2010: Erdos (no relation to the game, notable mathematician)

The name was decided based on a team vote, and the practice stopped in 2011 because we couldn't decide on a name as a team. The team still names their robots but I don't know how that decision is made nowadays.

The naming was more for internal purposes; I don't think anyone ever expected anyone outside our team to remember the names, but to us, the names made the robots feel more like our children, our own creation, and we felt more invested in them. We always referred to the robot by its name, and rarely called them just "the robot". If I tried to explain the connection I felt with Atlas (my first robot), you would probably think I was crazy, and I don't think I would have that connection if he didn't have a name.

That being said...whenever I talk/ed to someone else about those robots, I refer to them as "our 2008 robot", etc, because I never expect anyone else to remember the names. I think the only robot name from another team that I remember is 148's Tumbleweed.

I don't think it matters how a team names their robot as long as it works for them. Names in general do look good on promotional material (i.e. "Team 9999 Proudly Presents: ROBOTNAME"). As a lot of others have said, hardly anyone really remembers the robot names anyways - it only works in conversation if both parties know the robot's name, which rarely happens, so eventually it just becomes "hey remember that feature from 469's 2010 robot" etc.