Car Nack has made a prediction concerning autonomous and winning.
Do you think he is right?
?
Has anyone ever checked Car Nack?
Especially on these:
And as Dr. Joe pointed out, was he right with this one?
…Ive never heard of this guy.I think hes All WET.
Rumor has it that if Car Nack is all wet, so are the 4 National Championship medalians he is wearing around his neck.
Joe J.
According to Car Nack we had a 2 vs 2 game last year. 
I’d say yes for the elim matches at regionals and qualifying at champs.
Heh. The autonomous results are not an independent variable in determining the winner of the match. Car Nack’s prediction is much like saying that “the team leading the Rose Bowl at half-time wins the game 80% of the time.” It’s true, but not terribly profound, since, in this case, winning in autonomous is a sign that the leading alliance has already scored more goals, and has robots good enough to score. Given the advantage that the order of defensive and offensive periods gives the autonomous winner, the deck is more stacked.
So Car Nack is right in this case, but I’d give him more points if it weren’t such an obvious prediction.
Would Car Nack like to prognosticate about the likelihood of '07’s game being the long-awaited aquatics challenge?
While I think that 80% may be a little bit high overall. I think that the advantage afforded to the alliance winning the autonomous round will be enough to win most matches.
Therefore, I’ll vote yes in the Qualifying rounds during regionals.
During the elimination rounds, the defense will be a bit stiffer than last year.
While winning auto proves the ability to score AND gives a 10 point bonus, I think 80% is just a bit high. I vote yes for Championship qualifying matches only, as most teams will have had at least one prior competition under their belt to hone their skills, and I agree with others that the defense in elim matches will be tougher and keep that number down a bit.
My question is … who is going to keep track of this statistic ?? :ahh:
BTW … good poll/thread Dr. Joe.
I just don’t know if I believe it. What you are saying is that 4 out 5 times, what happens in 10 seconds predicts the total match outcome.
If so, not since Stack Attack has the first 10 seconds of the match been so important. It is astounding to me that this comment can be obvious to Bill Beatty and others but escape me entirely.
Joe J.
My opinion of this game is that it will be won by teams scoring in the center goal. Scoring in the center goal will rely on the ability of the robot to detect the lighted target above the goal and aim the ball shooting mechanism accordingly. I don’t think this is a game where a good driver can simply aim at the goal and score (without wasting many balls). This year the robot will rely on its control system to aim the ball shooting mechanism during any offensive play. Basically, if a robot can not score on the center goal during autonomous it’s more likely that the robot can not score in the center goal during the rest of a match.
car nack is right, but i’m not going to say why. I’d even go as far as to say that the alliance that wins autonomous mode will win the match even more than 80% of the time. i’m not going to get into my theories behind this, though, since they’re reserved for the team i’m mentoring. maybe a few weeks into build i’ll share them, but not now :]
Hey i’m with Joe and car nack i believe whoever wins autonomous 80% of the time will make a big difference not typically win but will make the winner of autonomous the favored to win most of the time.
I believe that Carnack is pretty close on this one. The only monkey wrench in the mix is there is still two other robots on that alliance that must perform well for the next two minutes. (Assuming that one robot outshot everyone else.)
It would seem that gaining the advantage for the first 40 seconds will be huge.
I think that Car Nack is right, and I think that it takes a pretty good imagination with how the game will play out to understand why. I won’t pretend to share this vision to the same extent that Car Nack does, but if I only understand half of it, I’ll agree with his predicition.
So whoever wins autonomous has an extra 10 points. This is… moderately influential, but not too swinging.
What is terribly important is the order. If you lose autonomous, you’re on offense first. Here’s the problem: What exactly do you plan on shooting?
Each team will presumably start with all 10 balls in their robot. If you lose autonomous, you’re heading down to the side of the field where there are most likely more balls strewn about because the losing machines were inaccurate. 5 machines are on that side trying to pick up those balls, so likely the offense will get only 60% of what was missed. Keep in mind, they’re using this time to refill as opposed to score points shooting. Even if the defense doesn’t play any defense and just picks up balls, or sits and gets refilled through a top loading mechanism under the human player station, they are NOT wasting time gathering the playing field balls during their 40 seconds of offense in the second round.
Second round, the team that wins auto now has picked up some balls, and ideally their back bot is full to the brim. These three machines do not need to spend any time loading their machines. I’m going to venture to say they have 15 or 20 more seconds of offense than the team that lost autonomous.
The last 40 seconds, the team that lost auto now needs to move to the other side of the field to score, while the team that won does not.
I’ll be bolder than Car Nack:
Assuming equal caliber machines, I think the team that wins autonomous wins 100% of the time, and this would happen even without the 10 point bonus.
And to futher this point, I believe that if you’re shooting the balls well this year, it’s done with significant software control. If you win the autonomous mode, you likely have better aiming functions, and I think those machines, will be of a higher caliber. The most accurate shooting with descent strategy will win this game.
Matt
Great post, I agree with all of your ideas. 
The 11 point advantage really isn’t much compared to the greater control you’ll have over the number of balls available for scoring in each round, not to mention the advantage, as you pointed out, not to have to cross the field to score.
The greater advantage, in my opinion, is that, if you get to the last round with a decent score, you can defend with three robots, something that I believe will be very hard to deal with AND, most importantly, you will have all your three robots close to your platform, for an easy 25 points, while your opponents will have to cross the field (once again).
just remember guys car nack only said something about autonomous i would personally like to see a tie everytime to make it more interesting but the chance of that happening is very low percentage.
Second round, the team that wins auto now has picked up some balls, and ideally their back bot is full to the brim.
Matt,
How is the back bot full to the brim? How many balls are going to be on the offensive side after you just WON auton? Are the human players from the other team going to fill your bot up? The back bot will hardly ever be full to the brim unless it didn’t dump it’s load in auton.
However, I agree with you on the other points. One you didn’t mention is the fact that playing defense first allows you to have 80 seconds of continuous offense and know what score you have to beat (think college football overtime). Your number of transitions (think basketball) is reduced so you spend less time traveling and more time scoring.
-Paul
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The back bot will have time to pick up any of the missed balls on the other half of the field.
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When the team that loses auto is scoring, the (winning teams’) human players will be gathering these balls and be throwing the balls to the other side of the field to be picked up by the back bot.
I guess it depends on how you think the HP’s will feed balls to their machines.
Matt
Every year, the day after kick-off, team 116 plays “Stu-bot” and the students (and mentors) act out the game as though they are the robots. The teams change constantly so that everyone can get a chance to participate. Half-way through the day I noticed that almost every single round was won by the alliance that ruled in autonomous. So I tend to agree with Car Nack, however, I also think there will be teams smart enough out there to come up with a strategy for doing well if they lose the autonomous round, and three teams like that on an alliance will be formidable.
Heidi