After the first team update came out, do you recall a first version game manual with so many mistakes?
Typos in key measurements most metric conversions where incorrect, they really forgot to add the 4 pieces max while amplified? My theory is that a large part of the manual was edited by an ai.
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Some years have more updates, some don’t. People make mistakes, especially in a 100+ page manual, and if they’re corrected during the first few days after kickoff I don’t think it’s that bad, even though it might be disappointing sometimes. speculating about who wrote the manual and counting whether there were 0 or 10 mistakes doesn’t seem constructive to me.
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And how do we know that the dimensions were mistakes and not simply revisions? It’s a 100+ page document, things get missed. Heck I’ve missed fixing things in a 100+ character sentence before… multiple times… I should probably not edit and just delete and start over in those cases.
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Even if this was the case, I don’t mind Editing by AI or conversions done by AI. I don’t mind this as long as there is human proofing afterwards.
I do think the game manual deserves extra scrutiny, but we also don’t know how big the GDC is and how many staff are assigned to the manual. Could be a people power problem.
Not worth raking them over the coals either way.
As a note of Policy FIRST allows AI usage, but they also did dictate that stuff written or rendered by AI is noted as such. I didn’t see any notes in the manual so I’d assume they’d follow their own rules. I’d love to see a copy of a game manual that says Written by FIRST and ChatGPT. But I didn’t see that.
For now, FIRST teams can use AI to assist in the creation of award submissions, handouts, writing robot code, etc. Teams using AI to assist in these ways must provide proper credit and attribution, and respect intellectual property rights and licenses. Proper credit can look like this: Essay created by Team XXXX and ChatGPT, or similar to the byline of this blog post. In addition, Judges have been instructed to evaluate teams based on what they have accomplished in relation to the judging criteria, and not discredit a team or rank them differently based on the tools they used. FIRST may revisit this subject in future seasons as the world evolves and new standards for the use of AI are introduced.
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OP specifically mentioned mistakes, and the 4 note thing was regarded by FIRST themselves as an “accidental omission”.
English is not my first language, so I’m not entirely sure what’s your distinction between a mistake and a revision. Anyway, both seem legitimate to me considering the short time that has passed since kickoff.
Talking about this on a discord server, but technically you could interpret this such that if you are on the carpet you qualify for ONSTAGE points. It seems a hyphen was omitted.
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Oh, I was specifically referring to the dimensions. It’s very possible that the dimensions that were changed were revised later in the process and just not updated.
Do you refer to the speaker “hood” size change? If so, I believe all of the fields are already done, I wouldn’t expect FIRST to produce new elements at this point of time.
if 1’ 16" was the original spec, someone was really goofing with convention 
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Go back 6 months when the manual and game were being written. It’s possible dimensions were different at that point in time. Then as they changed and were later produced. The manual was not updated.
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I don’t mind there being mistakes, I think they are to be expected. My point is the this year Manual seemed to have way more mistakes than usual. Coming from a team that uses the metric system, it stood out a lot the number of conversion mistakes while in the past this hasn’t been the case.
I’m sure that had to be a typo that just got missed.
Things happen. For several years they misused the word transitory for transitive when regarding contact between robots.
EDIT: None of the dimensions changed. Only the metric conversions which were done incorrectly - plus that 16" thing. For example, the original value of 802 cm for field width is the conversion of 26 ft 3 1/4 in - mistakenly using the inch part from the field length measurement.
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Where did they say it was an accidental omission? I assumed it was an intentional change given how much that changes the expected top-level strategy. They also didn’t mention a 4 note limit anywhere in the kickoff broadcast or animation.
It’s in the text of team update 01: "This edit is to remedy an accidental omission; the content was meant to be in the original manual release. "
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Yes. There are usually many revisions. I do think that FIRST could benefit from having some (more?) really good technical writers and editors on staff (or at least contracted), but adding more complexity (and cost) to their process has downsides too. And regardless, there are a lot more of “us” than there are of “them”, so mistakes are bound to happen, even though “they” are passionate about the program, are doing their best, and generally do a pretty good job.
I was actually really surprised/impressed that there was a slide in the credits at the end of kickoff (at 35:47 in the Youtube video) with the “Game Design Team” and “Game Manual Team”. I don’t recall seeing that before, though it’s certainly possible I just missed it.
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now we know exactly who to blame 
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Just as no man steps in the same river twice, no FRC team continues to play the same game for the entire build-and-competition season. The game is continually revised.
This is why “Team Updates” should rightfully be called “Rule Updates.”
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A mistake is you did not mean to do. Like providing the wrong dimensions. A revision could correcting a mistake. Or deciding to do something different like rephrasing a sentence so it is clearer.
Thanks! The example Andrew provided later in the thread helped me too.
While pretty egregious with missing the basic scoring functionality of the amp, there’s nothing new here in my opinion. We’ve seen game updates fixing a multitude of things year after year.
More work is definitely needed on behalf of the Game Manual team to ensure a better product goes out the door.