National championship scores? Thoughts on the game.

[archiver]

Posted by Alan Federman at 04/10/2001 8:26 AM EST


Engineer on team #255, Odyssey, from Foothill HS, San Jose and NASA.



I see the disional scores and championships scires but not the national schmpionship rounds. I take it that 71 is the lead seed and overall national champ - but how did the other teams do?

In general I think the game was too hard. I say this because almost no rookies(any?) were in the divisional
finals. The teams in there and especially the the top
8 in each division either had a lot of experience or a lot of money. Several of the teams could only have done as well as they did if they either finished their robot early or had a duplicate practice robot. Most of the teams in the top 8 had the experience of 2 regionals before comming into the nationals.

If the stated objective of this game was that "two good robots working together could beat any super robot working alone.." - I did not see this happening at the Nationals - though it may have happened in the regionals.

Though the idea of breaking teams up randomly into division in good in theory - it works contrary to human nature. If your a top team - you are going to pick allies that you are familiar with over those you don't know even if the stranger's performance is better.

Also - one way to beat 710 was to get small balls into the far goal -- I saw some robots that looked like they could do this - did any actually do it?

Finally while the time factor was cool I think it would have been better if it was continuous. i.e instead of a multiplier a fixed bonus 200 if you finish in 20 seconds 0 if you finish in 120 sec.
seconds.

Did anyone ever get a 3 times multiplier?