Terrifying Karthik

[IronicDeadBird]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

And the winner is...
Andrew Schreiber.

Thats a weird way to spell my name...
But yeah dat quote doe.

[Ginger Power]

I know the competition is over, but I feel the need to share the real reason that Karthik is terrified:

I love the spotlight feature

[Mike Marandola]

Originally Posted by Ginger Power

I know the competition is over, but I feel the need to share the real reason that Karthik is terrified:

I love the spotlight feature

How have I never seen this?

[RonAyyyyyyyy]

Plot twist: regardless of the results of the poll, Karthik would find them terrifying

Karthik is always terrified

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Joe Johnson

[*]Keefe2471: Posted quote from Joe G. TLDR: WE decided to Limbo but we are worried that THEY will struggle. ... Scaling in 2016 = Canburglaring in 2015. ... There are better ways to play the game than to limbo. Joe G. has a lot of great things to say but he lost me with Scaling is this year's Canburglaring. One literally ended the game on Einstein in the first second of autonomous and mattered almost not at all for 95% of the matches. Scaling is just one more way to get 10 points by a robot. It matters but it is not in the same class.

Just to clarify: I did not mean to suggest that Scaling is of comparable overall strategic importance to Canburgling. Rather, I wanted to look at the the variety of tasks FRC games have presented, and the degree to which they actually impart hard tradeoffs into the design process and require detailed analysis to determine if the pros of going for a given task outweigh the cons. There were a whole lot of teams in 2015 that justified their decision not to initially incorporate Canburglers into their 2015 robots with logic based very firmly on a purist sense of "we're not going to try to do everything, we have a simple robot, Canburglers are hard," when even a low tier Canburgler (a stick on a Versaplanetary or 3/4" bore piston) achievable by nearly every team and addable to nearly every robot after the fact could literally have become the most attractive robot feature of a good chunk of FRC teams. I think we will see a similar pattern in scaling this year. There have been a lot of rumblings about how hard and not worth it scaling is, but like Canburgling, it can be achieved effectively by small "auxillary" mechanisms, the type that's easy to work into any robot with withholding after seeing a cool implementation in someone else's reveal video. It won't provide the massive gains that Cangurglers did, but it's a potentially worthwhile bonus with very little risk associated with it.

The idea was to contrast this kind of task with the low bar, which dominates the design process with brutal tradeoffs in a way that these tasks just don't, not to imply that Scaling will be the sole deciding factor on Einstein. Scaling was a particularly handy way to illustrate the relative worth of the low bar because so many teams are claiming "Low bar is more important than scaling" through their designs and priorities, and a good scaler should have a much more consistent expected value for thee act of scaling than a shooter.

Also we're definitely worried about struggling as well . We think that we've approached the tradeoffs inherit to our strategy in a way that plays to our team's strengths and mitigates some of the chronic problems we expect many low bar machines to experience. Scarcity did play into our decision making process, and we expected low bar machines to be far less common than recent polls have suggested. We're locked in now and it's going reasonably well (I'm feeling quite a bit more confident in our design, and by extension, many other teams' designs, than I was when I made that post), but if we knew then what we know now, we may have still gone down a different path.

[Tim Sharp]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

I think what would terrify Karthik more than anything is having an important match to secure a top seed and being stuck with an undisciplined freelancing team that does not employ any strategy whatsoever. They incur a boatload of penalties every match they have played previously and could care less about the repercussions of their actions.

I think that is always a concern. What's different about this year is the enhanced destructive potential for a team that doesn't act with a sense of informed self interest, especially given the number of teams who plan to negotiate the low bar.

[Justin Montois]

Karthik is a statistics/numbers junkie.

He was just terrified knowing how much research and spreadsheets he will need to create to cross reference the results of the poll against the number of teams that actually pull it off and all of the computations and permutations therein.

[Craig]

Terrified that the field is going to be chaos with a bunch of short robots trying to navigate blind behind all those defenses?

[eedoga]

Originally Posted by Craig

Terrified that the field is going to be chaos with a bunch of short robots trying to navigate blind behind all those defenses?

I was thinking of adding flags on whip antenna's to solve that problem...

[JABot67]

I have a theory of why Karthik is terrified, and I think other people in this thread have brought it up as well. I went back and tried to find someone to quote, but alas, I got lazy.

It's possible that a member of a good team could be terrified at the thought of so many robots having the same match strategy, especially in autonomous. It is hard to convince teams to try other strategies during matches, and sometimes it rubs teams the wrong way... "We spent the whole season planning our strategy around this!"

Also it might be hard to find 3rd robots for 1114's alliance, if most teams available for the 16th pick of the draft have similar strategies. It may be difficult to work the third robot into the alliance. You could have them play defense and block shots, but not if they're short. A bit of cheesecake may be in order this year.

Scoring 3 boulders in autonomous this year will give you a huge advantage over your opponent. Figuring out how to form an alliance that can actually do this sounds challenging and possibly terrifying.

Okay, last reason we should be terrified: 254 apparently will be tall. I'm scared already. What if they have come up with a 469-esque robot that breaks the game?

EDIT: It's not just the Cheesy Poofs. Some other extremely good teams have decided to avoid the low bar. Perhaps they have won the meta-game this year? I can't wait to watch the competitions and find out what all this means.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by JABot67

Okay, last reason we should be terrified: 254 apparently will be tall. I'm scared already. What if they have come up with a 469-esque robot that breaks the game?

Source?



Karthik, I hope you're taking the posts in this thread like the "Andy Baker" thread. We all know you're fearless on the outside

[JABot67]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Source?

The poll results tell you which forum members responded yes or no.

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

Originally Posted by JABot67

The poll results tell you which forum members responded yes or no.

Different poll results on other threads also show 254 being screwed thanks to the Rock Wall change. I wouldn't quite factor a poll as a definite source. That being said, I think ignoring the low bar is a legitimate strategy/design. We probably would have done it too had we not had solutions to our strategy that allow us to remain short.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Rangel(kf7fdb)

Different poll results on other threads also show 254 being screwed thanks to the Rock Wall change. I wouldn't quite factor a poll as a definite source. That being said, I think ignoring the low bar is a legitimate strategy/design. We probably would have done it too had we not had solutions to our strategy that allow us to remain short.

254 was pretty screwed by the rock wall change, cost them over a week I heard.

Had to switch from regular swerve to tank tread swerve.

[Joe Johnson]

To all,
Time is almost up. Remember the deal we shook upon:

Best contributor to the thread as judged by me of midnight (EST implied) tonight gets the Mt. Dew.

"Best contributor" doesn't necessarily mean the person who best gets into the mind of Karthik. Contribute to the thread and I will hear you out.

Speaking of which, I will share my advice for success in the game Apples to Apples: Know your judge. By which I mean to say you are probably not going to get a lot of credit by complaining about how unfair life is as I have been know to make light of the Fairness Cult in many circles of FIRST.

Finally, I've been silent on this thread and in fact, after the first few messages, stopped reading. Not because I was uninterested but because I wanted to be as fair of a judge as I could and so I decided to wait and read it all in one go at midnight.

Even MORE finally, Karthik sent me a PM he's monitoring the thread and that some of the discussion may inform his famously overcrowded seminar at the FIRST Champs.

So... ...put your thoughts out there. People are listening.

Cheers,
Dr. Joe J.