It’s official.
Ever wonder what a Red Herring looks like? Well type it in to Google Images, or click here if you are feeling lazy. According to Google, these images are the top 10 images that most accurately describe the very essence of a Red Herring.
Take a close look at number 9…
-Chris
Nice
If he’d only known the fame that his hobby of teasing us would bring …
Heh… from the same site.
Just a note: That photo only seems to show up with safesearch set to moderate.
I like the large “5” a few down…
After looking at the search results and seeing how truly random this was i think this may be part of the clue. After not completely understanding the whole definition of a red herring. but from what i understand from Wikipedia it is something that leads us off on a path that is not at all where we want to go. This may prove once and for all that the game clue is completely useless and should be disregarded. since it will actually not have anything to do with the game, its just leading us to where we dont want to go.
Although off topic (there is one), I can’t help but confide that Tim is color blind. (Yes, he thinks that fish is red).
The game clue, although not useless, is probably only going to make sense in retrospect. There are probably hundreds of different conclusions that you can make a rational explanation for, all of which will appear valid until the game is revealed.
Look at last year’s:
*five 'bots tangling with pasta
a game piece obsessed with a shovel’s show
and seeing Montana’s green heights *
In retrospect, “five bots” refers to how many robot were allowed on one side of the field during an offensive or defensive period. I still don’t understand ‘tangling with pasta’ or the 2nd line, and the 3rd line turns out to refer to the camera target being up high. But pre-kickoff, there would have been thousands of different interpretatons of each word in it, many of them with very rational and well-reasoned arguments to back them up.
Pasta referred to the pool “noodles” that we had to use as bumpers
M. Krass figured out “Shovel’s Show”, Corey Balint guessed shooting.
CMU Cam was pretty much common knowledge.
Ah, that makes sense.
And it reinforces my point. During the 2006 game hint discussion, if someone said “hey guys maybe the pasta means that we’ll have to make bumpers in this specific fashion using this particular material that resembles pasta”, it would have seemed WAY off-base. The amount of indirection that it takes to come up with that makes almost any answer valid, which makes it a red herring. Since it is difficult to determine which phrase is a red herring and which isn’t, the clue isn’t particularely useful, except as something fun to guess at. Very few teams would have been convinced enough to start ordering parts for a ball-shooting robot based on the hint.
M. Krass figured out “Shovel’s Show”, Corey Balint guessed shooting.
But that means very little, since practically no matter what the game eventually was, there probably would have been someone that guessed a logical game from the hint. What if one robot had to stand on a weighted zone to enable scoring while the other 5 had to shove pool noodles or something similar into high-mounted slots in the playing field? That would also be a logical guess, but it turns out it was shooting balls instead. If the game came out, you could say “bongle guessed shoving pool noodles”.
Actually, that’d be a really cool game that has got me all excited.
There are weight-sensing platforms for both teams. Only one may be activated at any time. While a team’s platform is activated, scoring is doubled for that team. A team may only sit on their platform for maximum 30 seconds, and may not activate their platform twice in a row (the other team must activate theirs first). Platforms are placed so that scoring from them is possible, but very difficult so that it takes a real engineering effort to be able to. Scoring is basically anything, but I think the platform mechanic would be a cool kind of tradeoff: double your scoring, but play as a 2-robot alliance while that is going on.
Edit: Reading the 2006 game hint thread is REAL fun. There are people that are tantalizingly close in some respects, but very far off in others.
Here’s the thread: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41013&page=9&highlight=M.+Krass
Remember not to post in it, it IS a year old.
I love how any discussion around christmastime ends up gravitating to the game hint 
ironically, for those of you that didn’t know, that page belongs to Heidi Foster of team 116, or as known on these forums, Missinformation…our very own queen of photoshop 
apparently she gets alot of hits on that single picture to be in spot #9:)
Someone figured out the third line: The actor David Spade (shovel’s show) used to be on a TV show called “Just Shoot Me”. Hence, the “game piece obsessed with a shovel’s show” meant we were going to be shooting something (poof balls).
Oh wow, I had read that clue several times back both when it was first released and now, and I had never noticed it was shovel’s s***h***ow.
I bet you Dave is sitting there at his desk,
LAUGHING HIS FISH OFF
because he knows something we don’t. GR.
