Ethics 101: To re-use or not to re-use?

[aaeamdar]

Originally Posted by Marc P.

Naturally, this wouldn't make much sense given the change in game play form year to year, but how far off from reality could it be if a team has not much more than a pusher/drive train bot from year to year? In that situation, how would a mentor tell their programming team "sorry guys, the code we had from last year is good enough, so we won't be needing you." More importantly, what do the students learn from that?

[...] such as the camera tracker. Mentor to programming team: "Sorry guys, our code from the camera last year worked so well, we don't need to rewrite it. Just copy and paste it and call it a day." Again, what do the students learn from that?

Marc, as a previous poster said, there are some holes in your logic. I'm not sure how much knowledge you have of the programming process, but in your first example, a robot that simply pushes other robots around, there is (programmatically speaking) nothing for the programming team to do. The default code that you are required to use takes care of this already. R71 would have no effect here, since you would be using the default code each year (which I'm sure doesn't violate the rule).

In your second example, you seem to be out of touch with the way that the camera code was implemented last year. I'm sure some teams last year wrote their own camera code, but the vast majority of teams (including mine) took advantage of the code graciously provided by Mr. Kevin Watson. So in effect you have the mentor saying this: "Sorry guys, we have code already for the camera. Just copy and paste it and call it a day." Maybe you would argue that such code should not be provided?

Paul