Curie Semifinal 1 - 3, what happened?

Competition Championship Event
#1

For those of you who are curious, and I know many of you are, here’s a link to footage of Curie Semifinal 1 - 3, in which 1114, 469 and 1523 are eliminated.

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-8214223692796016767

Notice that 1114 is pinned for about 30 seconds, then driven into (hard) while their arm is tangled in the rack by team 48. Of course, the arm snaps in half, which is to be expected from what seems to me to be an intentional decision to do just that.

Note that there was a ten point penalty in this match for pinning, and no penalty at all for anything else.

#2

Wow, that’s… interesting

It appears that as soon as 1114’s arm was in a precarious position, it was pushed until the arm popped from the socket. What a terrible event to take such a wonderful alliance out of their chance on Einstein…

#3

OK, there may need to be a traffic cop in place on this one…

I’ll warn everyone right now, keep your emotions in check on this thread. We don’t need any “I hear that this happened, yada yada”. Keep your own credibility, tact, and dignity in place by only posting only what you must. If you did not see anything first hand, then your account of what happened won’t be worth much.

Tread carefully,
Andy B.

#4

That’s because 48 was pushing on 1114’s bumpers. They were pinning, but there’s no rule that says if something breaks an extra penalty must be assigned. If 48 had been directly smashing the 1114’s arm it probably would have been a different matter.

I was watching the match from the floor as I was on the pit crew, and it was pretty hard to see what was going on considering the mess of robots and the fact it occurred on the opposite side of the rack from the red alliance drivers.

#5

Well, i am not surprised about how long it took for someone to make a whole thread about this. I am disapointed in the reactions of individuals not on either team on how they are reacting to this and what thier thoughts are. I have talked to mentors on both teams and they feel bad at what happened and frustrated. I have sent out a few PM’s to other people about thier posting of this issue. I have grecieved anything from i agree with you too, forget you i have my thoughts and im stubborn i don’t like them anymore.

But i do ask one thing, please no bashing of one team becuase of what happended and thinking a team is no longer GP and is horrible and such. Would your grandmother be proud of how this discussion is going about? Atleast, i know my grandmother would be proud in what i am trying to do.

It seems every year there is one heated discussion about a little event such as this one every year. Hopefully one of these eyars this will stop. It’s just a game, it’s for HS’ers to learn, get out of the house, better prepare themselves for college and life, see a diffrent side of science and technology. This is not a wrestling league, so act like civil people and treat others the way you would like to be treated.

#6

wow
i am shocked about how this match was called.
the arm was still connected to the ringer also.
now the arm is completly off of 1114s robot.
the refs counted that the ringer that was scored was apart of 1114s robot because their arm was hanging there on it.
i will say no more.
there are some people on a team that frequently gets this done to that dont want to go tonationals anymore.

#7

I’m going to disagree with you here. I seriously doubt that they could see through the rack from the other side of the field that the arm was about to break and that hit wasn’t hard at all. They were just pushed while the arm was in a bad position and it broke.

Hard defense yes, intentional destruction and disqualification, no way.

Just my humble opinion.

#8

I agree that we should keep this discussion as civil as possible. From the video it is quite apparent that 1114 was caught up on the rack and that they were unable to move backwards and free themselves (we can see that 48 has more pushing in this scenario). 48’s continuous pushing of 1114’s robot is questionable. Therefore only 48’s drive team can truly tell us what happened.

Aside from the actual breaking of the arm, I would also like to know why this tube wasn’t counted as scored?

#9

I saw this match personally, so…

From what I saw, 48 was playing heavy defense on 1114. They knew the kinds of scores 1114 could put up especially when left alone, so 48 was pushing 1114 however they could. 1114 was first being pushed into the rack and their arm started bending backwards(the rack was being pushed). 1114 got free and started to place a tube on the middle row, and that’s when it happened. 1114 was placing a tube on a middle row spider leg from an angle. 1114’s base was being pushed forward by 48 but their arm was still hanging onto the tube which was in place on the spider leg. 1114 was close to dropping the tube on, all they had to do was let go but before they had a chance their arm snapped off.

This is what I remember.

edit//
The tube did not count because the arm was still attached to the tube.

#10

I thought that rule had changed, as the head ref on our field told me that as long as the tube was supported by the rack, the tube would be counted as scores (Refer to QF 1-1 on Galileo).

#11

This match unfortunately highlights only one of the several bad call made at curie. Semi Finals and finals are the most blatant examples of such claim.

Semi Finals 1 match 3. The match start with an iffy autonomous mode: 1114 releases the tube, but does not back up far enough and is still in contact with it. Although the stinger is cleared and the bar supporting the keeper, the referee takes it off. Now, this decision would have been reasonable, had it been consistent with other matches. During finals - 2, Foley Freeze goes for autonomous, clears the stinger, brings the keeper down on the spider leg and… does not have enough time to even open their gripper. Mrs. Referee comes, looks at it, and says it is scored.

But let’s go on with the semi-finals. Although 48 often paid attention to always pin for less than 10 seconds, they did pin for a long time on many occasions. I was disappointed to realize the referees were paying so much attention to 1114 that they did not even count down for any pinning done on 469. Furthermore, a robot is supposed to back up 3 feet after each time it pins another robot, which pretty much means pinning, backing up a second, pinning, backing up a second is not acceptable. Finally, when a team is entangled in the rack and its arm begins to bend horribly, pushing further to break it should have been illegal, one way or another.

But I digress, let’s go onto one last problem with this match: descoring. 469 scored a ringer on spider leg #6 I believe (did not have time to watch the video again), released it (passed the stinger and supported by leg) but was then pushed back by 48. The ringer was caught by the friction material riveted on the side of the robot’s gripper and while swinging around, 469 took the already scored ringer with them. Unfortunately, this situation occurred rarely and referees counted on the end game only to record the score. I’d also like to point out that the ringer to which 1114’s arm was attached after it was ripped off did not count, although the rules state that any part that is detached from the robot is not part of the robot anymore.

Conclusion on this match? I’ll take the word of the referee herself for it: “defense was not unreasonable” (there was, originally, no penalty given) and 1114’s arm riping off was just “one more design flaw”. Now, “I’d love to talk to you, but I have another match to ref”

I feel bad, however, for bashing 1732, 67 and 48, because what happened to them during the finals is way worse than anything else I’ve seen.

During Finals match 2, and I mean, the REAL finals match #2, the #1 alliance outscored the #2 alliance by as much as 30 points I believe. I was however disappointed that the referees had forgotten to count 1 ringer for the 2nd seed alliance, which would have bumped up their score by 4 points. Although it would not have changed the outcome of the match, it was clearly one more mistake made on this field. The 2nd seed alliance naturally complained about that. Without any other explanation than “a field fault was made”, the match was canceled and replayed. the #1 alliance lost the second match of finals because 4 points were forgotten…

P.S. Sorry to those who tried to dissuade me from posting. I tried to make it as tame as possible :blush:

#12

I believe that’s just how they scored it. I am not sure what rules they were going by(Funny I even had to say this).

#13

my whole thing is, the arm wasnt attached to the robot any more tho, so how could it have been apart of the robot?

#14

Several people have already said this, but I really don’t think we’re going to get anywhere worthwhile with the discussion of whether this play was too aggressive. However:

This seems to me to be a huge mistake. This Q&A response indicates that 1114’s arm was a field element by the end of the match, so if the tube was HANGING (which it looks to be doing), then it ought to have counted. Was the ruling really that the tube was still in 1114’s possession?

#15

yes the ruling was that the tube was apart of 1114s robot therefore not scored.

#16

I agree, I am just stating what happened.

#17

I’m on 1114’s side on this one… not only because of the fatality suffered by their robot, but because of how consistently poor the calls were by the refs this weekend. I don’t know… 229 partially suffered from a few bad calls (scored ringers not counting, tipped alliance partners not resulting in any form of penalization, etc), but nothing really that compares to what I witnessed in the divisional eliminations as I walked around.

I’m speechless this year.

No one could have predicted how nationals turned out this year, AND FOR GOOD REASON.

The referees decisions are final-- and that has been shown by the record books, but I’ll just have to say their POWER in these situations does not strongly correlate with their ABILITY to ensure that these finals calls are just-- that is, inline with what has been written in the rules.

This whole year has been weird, and I must say that I’m glad its over.

#18

does anybody have names of the refs and what regionals they reffed at.

if these guys have never worked together this season, then i think it is fair to say that a whole team of refs should be put onto a field, not ref x from y regional and ref w from z regional…

That could solve alot of these problems for next year.

I was uncival about this in another thread, therefore there is no need for me to restate my opinion.

#19

I am sorry to say that I agree. FIRST Teams are asked to be more and more professional as the years come by, and yet the infrastructure itself remains very amateurish. Maybe we should try and work out the few glitches that remain before trying to mass export a beta product.

Francois.

#20

I just wanted to bring up a suggestion, Just like they have in football, why don’t these refs have a booth review, just like the refs bothered to do at waterloo in qf2.4. allow a team to throw a red flag onto the field to call a challenge, just like in football, if the challenge is overturned, then it’s overturned, but if the ruling stands, then that alliance loses their timeout. I think that would really help stuff like this from ever happening.