Programmers: I Have A Challenge For You

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

My #1 priority for alliance selection at CT is strength of back autonomous mode. It's that important to winning, in my opinion.

Don't box yourself into a corner. I believe you are exercising a bit of confirmation bias by believing autonomous is the end-all, be-all that makes a team successful. The teams that win are the teams who have the experience and expertise to build high quality machines and play well thought out strategies. If they have gotten to that point, they probably put the time in to make their autonomous mode work well.

For example, I could say that the only thing I will be looking for in a team is the ability to hang in under 3 seconds. Does that make a robot good? Not necessarily, but the teams who planned ahead enough and implemented this strategy are probably strong to begin with. The hanging is just an indicator of this.

The problem with this is that there are always corner cases. There is always going to be a team that has a strong auto, but has a bone-head driver who just racks up penalties. The same way there will probably be a team who hangs fast, but can't do squat for the rest of the match.

All in all, looking at a team's auto mode is probably a smart thing to do. But, there are a bunch of other aspects to what makes a team successful, and many of them are intangibles. If you want to pick like the pros, don't put all of your eggs in one basket.