Is FIRST a robot building CONTEST?

[KenWittlief]

the contest is not between different teams, it's between team members and themselves...

I like this view. the teams I have been on we set objectives for what we wanted our bot to do, and we measured our success by how well we accomplished those goals.

I think its impossible to 'win' by shear determination and resources, because there are so many variables in the game. To begin with, you are now allied with two other teams at random, so you only bring 33% of the cards to the game. Winning a match has more to do with luck (like winning the lottery) than skill.

If I can give an example, the year I was on the Xcats, the Fairport team could not get a critical gear they needed in time for the Cleveland regional. Their robot did not move an inch in any of the seeding rounds. Purely by the luck of the draw, they were allied with excellent machines in many rounds.

The Xerox/Xcats team had a great robot that year, a large team, excellent funding, but at the end of the seeding matches the Fairport team with its non-moving robot was higher in the ratings than the Xcats.

I dont relate this as an injustice, but as an example of the amount of luck and chance that is involved. I took a good deal of good-natured ribbing from my mentor friends on the Fairport team that year. I think this illustrates that the 'contest' is only a means to see how well you did in designing your machine, not a fair and level playing field to see which team can build the best robot.

I need to point out the other functions on the fairport bot worked great that year, and they did get the gear they needed for their next regional, and were part of the winning alliance their next event. So from their persepective, they did very well that year.