It seems to me, that by developing software for a palm-pilot or other portable computing device… you could increase the efficiency of your coach tenfold. He/she would have to look away from the field less, the score computation would be more accurate than any human could be, and It could even tell you the next best move. My thoughts are that if paper and pencil were superior to calculators, we would not have phased them out for most advanced math.
What will your team be doing, and why?
I think having a scoring program would be nice. Depending on how it was made, it would be a very effective way of calculating score. I am making a scoring program on my TI-84 Calculator in TI-Basic, but the calculator’s processor is too slow to calculate the score in a reasonable amount of time. However, having a palm w/ a scoring program on it would be good, unless FIRST has a reliable scoring program that they use to display the score during the matches.
how would you communicate to the rest of your alliance?
Same way you would with a pen and paper.
to quote a great man…
Real coaches dont use “strategy assistants” during matches.
Iwill second that quote Jay, he was a great man.
I assume we’re discussing the coach behind the drive team? Are they allowed to bring paper or palm pilots?
<T23> The only equipment that may be brought on to the field is the OPERATOR CONSOLE, reasonable decorative items, and special clothing and/or equipment required due to a disability. Other items, particularly those intended to provide a competitive advantage for the HUMAN PLAYER, are prohibited.
Even a clipboard, much less a palm pilot, doesn’t qualify as “OPERATOR CONSOLE, reasonable decorative items, and special clothing and/or equipment required due to a disability”, or am I mistaken here? 
Don
I don’t think it would be that useful during the match, I might make something up to draw out pre match strategy.
This was resolved in update 3
Why would the coach look away less?
If anything they’ll look away more, inputting information. If the coach has no strategy aid then they don’t have to look away, ever.
2:15 is not enough time to input scoring into a laptop. They will have (at least) 2 people in charge of real time scoring. How can one person input the score and tell the drivers what to do next?
“Coach where do we score next?”
“…umm my windows/mac/linux/palm device crashed.”
I dont really see why you would need to know the current score, just by looking you can estimate. Also you always want to break up the biggest rows of the other team and extend your biggest. There really isn’t a need for the white board, you are standing close enough to see every thing.
The coach would have to look away less for a palm device than for the paper/pencil route. Lets face it… Scoring in this years game is not going to be very fast paced, to pick up a tube, go to the proper place on the rack, and score the tube, you will take at very least 15 seconds. With the coach having to look away for maybe 2 seconds, not much will happen when they do. The machine would obviously be more accurate at tabulating score than a human, and that will be very important to this years game. With all of the rows/columns, any human, even a “real coach”, who is supposed to be counting rows and columns will miss things that will lose their team the match.
Think of it simply:
All that guy with palm-pilot has to do is tell the computer where the tubes are being placed, the computer does ALL the tabulating. The coach then relays the information to the drivers.
Guy with paper has to mark down tube locations, try to identify all rows and columns, count the number of tubes in each row and column, and multiply in their head to find the score. At the same time he has to try to predict the highest possible scoring next move. Once he thinks he has the correct move, he has to relay it to the drivers.
Guy will no scoring aid has to do EVERYTHING in his own head.
EDIT: The chances of a palm OS crash while running as simple a program as this are about the same as the coach having a seizure in the middle of the match.
James your gonna make a good coach someday.
KISS Method
People are not always right. Estimating may work in some cases but no one is perfect, the score could be so close, and it may look like you are winning, but in real life you are loosing but just a few points. Last year the real time scoring was really nice because you new what the out come was most likely going to be. Yes it was wrong alot of the times but it was nice to have. Having a program to see what the score exactly is without penalties, would be very nice to have. Sure you have to keep an eye on the game at all times, but it is nice, not having to crunch numbers through your head. And while crunching the numbers you could mess up, because of something exiting that might happen on the field.
That’s the point. You DON’T crunch numbers. Make big rows. Break up your opponents. Place spoilers in the middle of blocks if you’re opponent makes them. Simplicity FTW!
EDIT: If people played without PDA’s back when FIRST had this addiction to nigh-impossible-to-calculate-in-your-head multipliers, then we can play without PDA’s now.
This is true, they did not have them back then, I’m just saying that it would be a helpful tool. You don’t need to have it , but it would be one of those nice things to have.
wheres the not gonna use anything option
EDIT: Call me old fashioned, but a coach should be able to make a viable strategy decision on the fly at any point during the match. ALSO, your coach isn’t going to be jsut focusing on the rack (although most of the focus will be here). You need to be aware of where all the robots on the field are at the same time, what they’re doing, how quickly they’re doing it. EVEN IF i thought using a palm/laptop/whatever were effective, it is only concentrating on 1 portion of the game. YOU DO NOT NEED TO KNOW THE SCORE, you just need to know how to increase your score and decrease theirs which is fairly simple, if you see a row of 6, put a spoiler on either the 3rd or 4th spider leg to make it a row of 2 and a row of 3.
As said earlier, back in the day, which was a wednesday by the way, the multipliers were ridiculous (in 2001 it relied on how much time it took your alliance to “get satisfied” with their round). Coaches did not need a palm pilot to tell them the exact score. They just knew they needed to put balls in goal, put bigger balls on a goal, get both those goals balanced on the platform, and get the bots back in the home zone AS QUICK AS POSSIBLE.
I think your coach should be able to observe the situation and know what to do without too much effort based on pure common sense combinded with a little logic. Thats how i’ll be rollin this year.
I guess it fits in with the “I don’t know” option, but I forgot to add it.
EDIT:
Using a palm pilot doesn’t automatically make your coach have 60 less I.Q. points, he will still be able to do the same things he would without it, it is just a useful tool; like a calculator, or the cotton gin.
Your coach will be able to better make a strategy decision when he is properly informed. He will be more completely informed with a palm pilot, or other such score-keeping device. On our team, the coach doesn’t drive the robot, and the drivers aren’t automatons doing only what they are told while on the field. The coach will tell what the best strategy is, and the drivers will decide how to get it done, because it is their job to drive the robot; not the coach’s.
Since all the palm pilot will be is a tool, it will improve efficiency. “put it where you think it should go” is fine and dandy, but I’d hate to be the coach when you lose the match by 2 points because you missed something.
Frankly, I find this blatant rejection of technology to be disturbing on a forum like ChiefDelphi, whose sole purpose is to promote it. A hammer is a hammer, and nobody refuses to use it because : “Real carpenters don’t use hammers when building things.”
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that a palm will be completely accurate because of the difficulty in seeing the other side and input errors but I agree with you.
I honestly believe KISS is overrated. Computer hardware, software, cars, cellphones, mp3 players, HDTVs are just a few examples of how everything far more complex than it was even a few years ago. Why is FIRST pushing so many sensors on us? They want us to develop more complex software with more advanced controls and PID algorithms.
At the very least, the KISS formula has to rewritten every year to keep up with the pace.
I am not saying you should completely dump simplicity but rather you shouldn’t dump form and function for simplicity, most of the time.
The fact is simplicity has limitations but complexity doesn’t. In general, a simple robot more limited than a complex one. Why do people want more options in everything(cars, computers, CELLPHONES)?
There’s so much more to being a good coach than keeping track of score. The coach needs to be aware of what all 6 robots on the field are doing at all times. Each time the coach looks down to input, s/he instantly loses track of what’s happening on the field. This isn’t a sacrifice that I’d be willing to make. The time spent inputting, is time that isn’t spent communicating with the drivers. As a coach, you want your full attention on the entire field. You just can’t do that if you’re inputting into a handheld.
Sure it’d be handy to know the exact score at any given moment, but it definitely isn’t necessary. By examining the state of the rack, a good coach should be able to determine the optimal move quite quickly. This is something that should be practiced extensively before competition. Once this skill is perfected, there should be no need for a palm pilot in the box.
If we were back in the day of two coaches, having the second coach dedicated to scoring and using the palm, might be something that I would consider. But for Rack ‘N’ Roll, I just see the input time being a bottleneck and a distraction. Especially in matches where you have 4+ competent scorers.
I’ll take watching a full match and my own calculations over being distracted and using the palm any day. This is from someone who coached in 1998, when the formula for scoring was x(2^y).