Curie Semifinal 1 - 3, what happened?

[Po-ser]

I was watching the Curie matches. I think that it's horrible what happened to 1114. My team built a similar robot (well, similar in the sense that we tried to integrate ramps and an arm). To save weight and ramp space we made a "clock arm". Here's my story and my perspective on this:

http://rassi.ath.cx/stuypulse/view_p...eek-1&id=Tom10

We had a tower on our chassis and a light aluminum tube cantilevered out on a single shaft. Now, we thought this was the coolest thing ever. It ramped, it picked up tubes, it scored... but we got to our first regional at Trenton and two things happened: 1. we had a practice match against a robot with no arm which was purely defensive and they pushed us into the rack and continued pushing even when it was clear that our arm was entangled. 2. when we got our match lists we realized that due to the algorithm, we were going to face that same team every single match. When we talked to them about being aggressive, they told us that their only strategy was defense. And it's true. What could they do but block and push? You can't do it perfectly your first match, and so they continued playing D on us, but improved match after match, keeping away from illegal moves.

So here's my analysis: you can't blame defense bots. That was a viable strategy this year for those that couldn't design in an arm. There's clearly a reason that bumpers have been written into the guidelines. After our arm snapped off and we disassembled it, all we could do during matches was play defense ourselves, and if anyone's ever driven, you know how hard it can be to push someone out of the way but not too hard. Sometimes you can't back out, sometimes you're stuck. Sometimes it's true, you get caught up in the moment--especially when the heat is on like it is at the championship. Can you imagine the pressure to look good?

The bottom line is: nobody comes to a regional intending to completely wreck someone else's six weeks of hard work. Nobody. Whatever the refs say is up to them, and being sore about it now is useless. 48 had a strategy and did what they had to do. They seem to have felt really bad about it and still do. 1114 worked really hard, but you know what? Everybody knows how great their robot is, and they'll get plenty more shots at Einstein in the future. It appears to be bad luck to me, for both teams, but it's not the end of the world and I don't think it's worth hating anyone for.