First of all, I would like to thank everyone, especially the honorable technical committee. Getting feedback from teams and holding meetings are great. These meetings and actions are effective in making the matches more friendly and deserve to be appreciated.
Let’s get to the main point. I think that for the changes in the rules of the competition, it is necessary to have a document that is agreed upon. This document helps us to clarify the principles of our method firstly for ourselves and secondly for the students. This document tells us what to do and what not to do.
In 2019, I wrote a guide document to change the rules in the hope that it can be helpful. The important thing is that this is just a suggestion and I invite everyone to express their opinions on various aspects of it. Expressing more opinions makes us reach a better conclusion and our thoughts become closer to each other.
Note: I wrote this document in 2019. For this reason, its examples are old, and the laws that have been given as examples have changed now.
Hi @javadrah. First, thanks for sharing this and participating in the calls.
I hope you see that the committee has been making a big effort to get feedback for the rules before locking them in. It is difficult to balance keeping the advanced teams engaged and innovating while at the same time keep the rules approachable for new teams. We must have been on the same page when we decided to change the restrictions on cameras as you pointed out!
What we seem to be not on the same page on yet is your approach to 5 and 6.
In the case of compulsion to share knowledge - this is not so much a rule but something we award teams for doing. This is why we give such significance to the poster sessions and take the time to have group interviews. A team could choose not to share their designs, but then their chances for any recognition via awards would be limited. Would you agree that we only award the teams that are open to sharing their knowledge?
For the point about not having laws to enforce: fraud and deception are tricky things to detect by their very nature. Case in point, I was advising judges for another competition where they suspected that the students did not program their robot. When I went with the judges for a second interview, turns out that the programmer was just quiet and not sure what to say during the initial interview. Even in cases where one strongly feels like there is some sort of misconduct, they could be wrong.
One could argue we could investigate but the questions are who and when? The only reason why a second interview took place in the example above is because we were ahead of schedule and I had the experience to know enough it was worth looking into more. At most competitions, the time and attention are not likely to be available to give the appropriate amount of investigation into to any misconduct. I’m curious what we could do every time a team is accused of wireless controlling their robots with their other robot that is already linked? Having reffed and observed many matches, the losing teams will often try to find any sort of glint of misconduct from the wining team - the only thing that keeps these competitions running smoothly is that we have easily enforceable rules.
Finally, could you please clarify in this sentence “But if lying becomes a bad and embarrassing issue, the number of people who say lies will decrease” how you see lying becoming bad and embarrassing? I have a feeling that there may indeed be something that is missed with this suggestion and I genuinely would like to hear what alternative approaches you may suggest.
Hello
First of all, thank you for expressing your point of view. As I said at the beginning, I find the efforts of the technical committee to get feedback very admirable and I consider it a positive step forward. We should thank the technical committee for this.
If I may, I would like to talk first about fraud and deception. I think I have expressed my key sentence in this regard. “THE CULTURAL DILEMMA ONLY SOLVES WITH A CULTURAL
SOLUTION”. The problem of fraud and deception is a cultural problem and has a cultural solution. When we say that lying should become an ugly and disgusting behavior, it means that we should turn lying into an ugly and disgusting behavior through advertising and culture. Sometimes this is beyond our control (because it is very much related to the education, culture, and general behavior of the people and the government of each country), but sometimes we can do behaviors that devalue fraud, deception, and lies.
It is very clear that we cannot solve this “cultural” problem completely. Rather, we can only take a step in this regard.
The technical committee has now promoted “knowledge sharing” as a “value” by awarding a team that shares its knowledge. This is a positive and correct cultural action. But it is possible to go beyond this.
For example, the way of holding competitions can be changed in such a way that “sharing knowledge” becomes a tangible value. For this, we have to design the way of holding competitions and its rules in such a way that the teams need to communicate with each other to win. On top of that, it can be made that the teams are willing to share their knowledge with others in order to win the competitions. (Note that willingness does not mean suppression or coercion, a team can try to succeed without sharing its knowledge, but it has to go through a more difficult path to do so)
These goals can be achieved by performing gamification on the way of holding competitions. (I must say that although my specialty and education are in CE and I have more than 12 years of experience participating in RoboCup Junior Soccer as a mentor, I have a board game design and game development company and therefore I am familiar with game concepts .)
In any case, around 2018, I proposed a new way of holding a competition, which is old and can be improved a lot. Also, I have clarified the schedule required to hold it, which can be seen in this post.
I would be very happy to discuss more about the rulemaking methods. I think that if we reach a document in this regard, it can define our principles and method and determine the way for us.
I will be happy to receive your comments.
In any case, thank you very much for your time.