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fr00tl00p wrote: These are just a few of the ideas I can think of right now, I don't want to come off as rude or anything, I just really dislike the current idea of holding an object up high.

Oh, you weren't being rude or anything, I just thought that by judging programming you meant judging the actual lines of code that went into a robot, which would be a pretty large burden on the event supervisors.

There will be several tie-breaking mechanisms in the rules this year that will prevent a similar situation from last occurring. We discussed using something like stacking blocks or coins or whatever, but it is too similar to the number of motors requirement. That is to say, the resolution is either too coarse or the challenge too difficult (stacking coins would be very hard/having fewer than 4 motors is nearly impossible) to provide separation between teams.

chalker7 wrote: There will be several tie-breaking mechanisms in the rules this year that will prevent a similar situation from last occurring. We discussed using something like stacking blocks or coins or whatever, but it is too similar to the number of motors requirement. That is to say, the resolution is either too coarse or the challenge too difficult (stacking coins would be very hard/having fewer than 4 motors is nearly impossible) to provide separation between teams.

are you implying the death of the least-number-of-motors tiebreak? Just having more objects seems to make more sense to me.

kennethfriedman wrote:

chalker7 wrote: There will be several tie-breaking mechanisms in the rules this year that will prevent a similar situation from last occurring. We discussed using something like stacking blocks or coins or whatever, but it is too similar to the number of motors requirement. That is to say, the resolution is either too coarse or the challenge too difficult (stacking coins would be very hard/having fewer than 4 motors is nearly impossible) to provide separation between teams.

are you implying the death of the least-number-of-motors tiebreak? Just having more objects seems to make more sense to me.

I'm implying a better set of rules, not perfect but we definitely pay attention to the issues from year to year and try to address them as best as possible.

Make the robot build a lego structure set at competition. Robots in industry build structures, why shouldn't ours? Fastest time and have intricate structures. Small legos so the the kit people have a chance

But I feel like there definitely should be a variable score element. To me, ties being as likely as they were last year at upper level competitions mean that even if you have a really good arm, if you make just the smallest mistake, you can lose your shot at a medal. With a variable scoring piece to the event, you can lose points in one area as long as you make up for it in another, which I think is preferable to the alternative. I personally think the height score mentioned would be a great way of doing this, provided the right restraints are put on it.

I hope I’m not posting this too late but as a coach I feel like the height thing would be a huge safety issue. (Not for my team as we will be concentrating on getting all the points for most of the season.) I think the idea of holding metal components 3+ meters (someone can correct me if that is higher than possible) is dangerous if those components fail. You could have sharp metal pieces falling and if they break violently given an initial velocity. I just want to make sure someone has considered the safety aspect.

I think that a better tie breaker would be the amount of time taken to complete the tasks, and any time left would be added to the points.

hqureshi wrote:I think that a better tie breaker would be the amount of time taken to complete the tasks, and any time left would be added to the points.

Since leaving tiebreaking to time means ties are broken by, in some cases, a fraction of a second, this approach in my opinion is not as good as other methods, because since most teams are controlling thier robot in competition, each run time is going to vary by several seconds, and ties are broken more by luck than by an attribute of one arm being better than the same attribute of another arm.

Yes, that does make sense, but at least it is more objective than using technical drawings as a tiebreaker which depends on what the judges think about them, and that makes it subjective. I found that very annoying especially in Protein Modeling.

hqureshi wrote:I think that a better tie breaker would be the amount of time taken to complete the tasks, and any time left would be added to the points.

If the duration of run were to be incorporated into the tie breaker, I could only see it as a second tie breaker, behind number of motors. If it were the first tie breaker, we would see the emergence of ultra expensive dual arm robots that could essentially complete the tasks in half the time. If it were a second tie breaker, however, it would only be differentiating the perfect-scoring four motor robots at nationals and perhaps a couple of state tournaments. In my opinion, there would be a large enough difference in run time between these robots to justify the tiebreaker. It wouldn't be trivial; the duration would be proportional to how good of a robot the team has, how efficient their strategy is, and how much they have practiced.