2007 Official FRC Game Hint / Email Blast

[BandChick]

Originally Posted by Jane

I have a little plateau.

With all the little people and the plateau, volcano - I can't help but think of an old movie, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, with Richard Dreyfuss. He made one out of mashed potatoes. When they begin try to communicate, they use a bar with lights and sounds (5 tones) - I don't have the correct terminology but it is way cool.

That was my first thought when Elgin said volcano.
And on the topic of Close Encounters, my friend Nikki just got those 5 tones for her text message ringtone.

[Sindegen]

I have a lot of thoughts that needed to be spewed out. Some of them are:

1) If there was a banana in the old hint the first thing I thought of was slipping. Maybe if there were circular platforms may they make it so it's hard to get on top?

2) With the new clue, I see the faces that looks like a crowd... I see a fish at the bottom right. But is it just me or is there a face in the bottom left hand corner? Looks like 2 eyes an open mouth a hat and a bearded sillohuette. Looks like something from a cartoon. Please tell me I'm not the only one that sees it.

These are just some thoughts right now, I will post if I have any other things on my mind. Hope this brings up good conversation!

[BrianR]

I agree that this may be an update, probably to sharpen certain things that hadn't popped out earlier. If so, there is the possibility that they would change other things as well, hiding a message in the picture. I would bet that they might use steganograpy (credit goes to Mazin). All of the links to the old picture are low, so if someone is sure that they have the original, please post it. That way we have both of them here to compare...

[CE Mexican]

Guys...we have recieved an updated clue...
look at the update date..January 2nd...

The new one shows a few more things that i have noticed...
there are 2 crowds: top left and center right' as people have already mentioned

AND..i have got a pruff that robots WILL NOT be stationary...
loo at the top right cornet, there's a wheel there...that sais it all


that object that looks like a wheel in the upper right corner also looks like an alien face, with a hood on it if you look at it. Sorry guys but im just talking out of my a$$!

[Sindegen]

Hmmm... My friend and I just looked at the old picture and the new picture... And it seems to be the same, I can see all of the things before... Or are we looking at the wrong picture?

[MikeDubreuil]

Originally Posted by Sindegen

Hmmm... My friend and I just looked at the old picture and the new picture... And it seems to be the same, I can see all of the things before... Or are we looking at the wrong picture?

At the very least FIRST put a larger image up. The size changed from 600 x 449 to 800 x 600 pixels. With this change more details are showing up in the image.

I have noticed that the diamond plate disc is reflecting red and blue light.

[j_howard61]

I think Joe DiMaggio, or "the Yankee Clipper", was number five for the Yankees. But what does that have to do with anything?

[Goober!!!]

All I have to say is "Speed Racer"???

So maby the game has to deal a lot with speedness in the game?

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by j_howard61

I think Joe DiMaggio, or "the Yankee Clipper", was number five for the Yankees. But what does that have to do with anything?

I think a more likely guess in that vane of thinking would be third base.

[Nawaid Ladak]

Have they came out with the list of what etquitment we need to build the feild.

they usually release that information the week of kickoff

[Ryan O]

Hi,

Our team thinks we have an idea:

The five looks like it is from POOL ball.

The backround looks like water: Maybe a POOL as a clue for POOL balls?

Anyway, just an idea.

[DanDon]

Originally Posted by FreedomForce

Have they came out with the list of what etquitment we need to build the feild.

they usually release that information the week of kickoff

The past few years, the parts list came out the thursday before kickoff, so in effect: maybe tomorrow.

[EDIT]
Bill of Materials

This season, each team's decision regarding building field mockups may be a bit more complex than normal. The Game Design Committee feels
that an advance Bill of Materials (BOM) list might be misleading and cause some teams to buy more materials than they will likely use.

Please wait for a full set of field drawings and their lower cost equivalents to be released immediately following Kickoff. Knowing the nature of this year's challenge, you can more logically decide what to buy and build.

See you at Kickoff!
[/EDIT]

[Atomika]

Originally Posted by BrianR

I agree that this may be an update, probably to sharpen certain things that hadn't popped out earlier. If so, there is the possibility that they would change other things as well, hiding a message in the picture. I would bet that they might use steganograpy (credit goes to Mazin). All of the links to the old picture are low, so if someone is sure that they have the original, please post it. That way we have both of them here to compare...

Attached; also uploaded to imageshack at this link.

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by Elgin Clock

The Diamond plate and the 5 seem recessed in a bowl shaped object. The diamond plate is obviously not see through so I can't tell if this object is a rolling goal but I do believe we have a goal on our hands.

Blue 5 pt goal, in the shape of a Volcano - on the real field made out of some poly resin material that is translucent blue and maybe more colors for more teams.

If I had a better rendering software.. and a premade crowd for refraction purposes, I could duplicate the picture exactly.. but.. this will have to do with just Solidworks and default textures.

My final guess.

[BrianR]

Thanks for posting the original image. I used the Digital Invisible Ink Toolkit, located at http://diit.sourceforge.net/index.html. When comparing both smaller images, I found them to be identical. I have a little too much time on my hands... so I decided to keep experimenting...

I wanted to see what kind of difference encrypting "AIM HIGH" in the picture would make.

When I did this I had these results:
Results of benchmark tests
==========================

Average Absolute Difference: 4.6866898009652585E-4
Mean Squared Error: 6.082725060827251E-4
LpNorm: 3.0413625304136254E-4
Laplacian Mean Squared Error: 4.206612200901864E-6
Signal to Noise Ratio: 1.3982824224590164E8
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 5.85936396E8
Normalised Cross-Correlation: 0.9999989969072935
Correlation Quality: 126.60633961495463

This shows that the software is capable of finding very small changes in the image... and I decided to make one more attempt. I took the new high quality image, and resized it to match the one they released earlier, as the program requires the images to be the same size. Upon comparison, I had there results:

Results of benchmark tests
==========================

Average Absolute Difference: 15.601511706752822
Mean Squared Error: 756.6327031231303
LpNorm: 378.31635156156517
Laplacian Mean Squared Error: 2.111745474975075
Signal to Noise Ratio: 112.4107839655667
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 471.0462533919842
Normalised Cross-Correlation: 0.9982814866037124
Correlation Quality: 126.38889170404684

If you look at the Average Absolute Difference, this, along with most of the other values, is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE greater than my "AIM HIGH" test. Now, I can't guarantee that my method of resizing the large image would match the method the GDC did, which would cause these differences. Also, if they chose to make 'minor adjustments' to the actual content of the image, that would create this kind of difference in the photo. I think that differences seen here are very high for a simple text message - it would have to be over 1000 characters long.

Regardless, I can tell you that small image and the large image are subtley different. Whether there was some touch-up going on, or if there is a message hidden in the background, I am unable to tell, but they are clearly different at some level.