This makes a lot of sense, and is something I’ve tried to emphasize. I appreciate RECF’s efforts to do what is best for the majority of learning students and teams.
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I completely agree. After all the work that’s been put into giving us a season, anyone who thinks they can cheat their way through worlds needs to take a step back and reconsider their integrity. Thank you for giving us something to look forward to.
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My “lol” in the context that I used it in has no connection to me not valuing the efforts put in by the teams putting their best foot forward, that is a total exaggeration of what I actually said. I was attempting to present the humor behind playing a very swing-like game in the most non-swing like format. I am incredibly proud of all the teams who decided to stay involved this year despite the health risks that currently exist.
With that being said, what happens when the efforts of those hard working teams gets thrown out the window because of an advantage that another team gains because of the various methods of cheating that Tilden pointed out? All those hours spend over the 12 month period since the game was released gone to waste? All that money teams spent on parts and registration fees down the drain? Even though the new registration fee will be more forgiving than it was in previous years, you are still paying probably a few hundred dollars for registration (if I had to guess) to play out of your living room, might as well try our best to make it a fair competition. Not to mention the very inconvenient timing of the virtual worlds, smack dab in-between AP and IB exams.
Look at the team that started this thread. 2114X. Absolute powerhouse in the current generation of competitors. If there’s one team that we know for sure always puts their best foot forward before or during a pandemic, its them. Tilden’s purpose wasn’t to say that teams will cheat, he is attempting to point out the possible methods teams could use to cheat and see if RECF can address those issues in any way. If they can, that’s awesome and virtual worlds will be a bit more fair, but if not, teams just got to work with the given situation.
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no, but it is something that will happen. in a competition this large, people will use any way they think they can to get an unfair advantage. It could be something as small as using an illegal rubber band size or using lexan thats slightly too thick, but there will be cheaters and there needs to be a plan to reduce successful cheating.
I appreciate the REC’s efforts to continue this season, but we cant just have a zoom call and trust.
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@admin can we lock this thread? While there was a legitimate discussion, this thread will serve to educate people on ways to cheat as much as it will prevent it. I myself hadn’t considered custom motor cores before reading this. I would never cheat like that but who’s to say someone else wouldn’t.
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you cant run away from cheating. a community has to dicuss it or else the cheaters will get away with it. There is a reason open source software gets vulnerabilities patched so fast.
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Yeah but we can do this better. If we make a “cheating mitigation” thread, instead of just having the unclear thread name and a bunch of ideas of people throwing out ideas of how to cheat, but not solving it.
That’s exactly why I brough it up. No one seems to think outside of the box, or people seem to be too naive to think that people won’t do this. Trust me, someone eventually will. Had I not brought it up, then there would be no way to combat this kind of cheating. But now we have the entire vex community seeing it and able to brainstorm ways to combat this.
I can already think of a firmware update that uses the IMEs to detemine the max speed of each motor. Since the internal gear ratio only has 3 discrete, constant legal values, it would be trivial to catch someone trying to illegally improve the native performance of the motor.
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That’s a really good idea, still defeatable though - there are other ways to make a motor OP than through increasing speed. The voltage should be inherently capped to 12V from VexOS (and from hardware? I don’t know enough about electronics to answer that), but I think the current limiting is on the motorside. I wonder if there’s a way to limit current on the brain’s side to stop that.
And I completely agree with you that anyone who doesn’t think cheating (or attempted cheating, depending on how well things go 
) will be rampant is pretty naive to how much teams (china is notorious for this) already modify the rules to their liking. There’s a reason PTC checks existed, people tried to cheat. Except this year, we can’t do PTC checks (or equivalent for V5, whatever).
I’m honestly shocked that so many people think that nobody will cheat or that this thread will increase the amount of cheating. Dan, Grant, whoever else reads this: People will cheat. It will be an issue. You need to find ways to catch that and stop it as much as possible.
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To be clear, changing the cartridge will not improve the motor performance. It simply changes the tradeoff between speed and torque. In theory you get an advantage in that you don’t have the friction losses associated with an external geartrain, which is… a marginal gain. In order to do that, you need to custom machine a gear cartridge robust enough to stand up to the forces being exerted on the robot, and at the point you have that machining capability… why are you doing VRC? If we’re going this far, sure you can have a firmware update, but I can just say “well, the cheater is going to upload custom firmware.”
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Why should the thread be locked? Running away from problems and pretending they don’t exist isn’t an effective solution. That’s half the reason we’re in the situation we’re in. But don’t get me started on that issue.
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It might be worth exploring considering WHY a roboteer would choose to cheat and attempt to address the root cause rather than the implementation.
Why do people cheat? Potentially:
- An over-emphasis on winning
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- Seeking the attention and status
- Belief that they won’t be caught
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- Or, if they are caught, that it will be so far after the fact as to be moot
- The consequences of being caught are lower than the “rewards”
That said, I think what @lacsap and Dan are saying is that part of the VEX ethos is Character. Character, in one definition, is “doing the right thing when no one is looking”. We rely on the competitors to act in Good Faith.
Do competitors here really want a more involved Inspection process? Do they really want robots and fields to be sized before and after each and every match? Do they want to have to require Remote skills to be recorded (and reviewed) via multiple cameras.
While there are definitely bad apples out there, I believe nearly all Vex competitors really do want (and act) in ways that adhere to good sportsmanship.
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That’s a lot of the problem here - It’s impossible (or unreasonable) to check many things online.
However, brain firmware is on the harder side to mess with yourself. If they release a firmware update the day before that does something that’s required for worlds, that might not give teams enough time to reverse engineer and remove any limits or anything (especially if those limits aren’t implemented until that pre-worlds patch, but I’m iffy on requiring an undertested firmware update the day before worlds). That also can update the motor firmware, which helps fix that problem too. I’m sure there will be some team that stays up all night to do it, but it certainly mitigates the problem.
Cool idea, but actually doesnt work in practice since the internal motor encoders are between the motor and the cartridge, not after.
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I think at some point we just have to say,
There will probably be some people who try to cheat, no system is perfect, but it won’t be significant.
A thread talking about it is only likely to give more people the idea to try it. I think the best thing that can be done if you have a concern is to privately reach out to the RECF, but I have to say, if I were them right now I’d be incredibly disheartened that this thread even exists. They’ve done so much to accommodate us these past two years, and the fact that seemingly so many competitors seem to expect such high rates of cheating can’t be something they like seeing.
My recommendation, for now, is that this thread be unlisted to allow continued discussion, but not have a big poster that says “THIS IS HOW YOU CAN CHEAT” visible to everyone that opens this forum.
EDIT: This wasn’t supposed to be a reply to anyone, please ignore that
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You can ensure that the 3600rpm out of the motor doesn’t go above that (or above approximately that, since you can get a bit higher if you set voltage instead of velocity), which makes it harder to replace the motor itself with a stronger one. That and a current limit are the best ways to prevent modifying the electronic motor itself. I see no real way to prevent people from using custom cartridges.
A con of using the motor encoder to block switching out the motor is that it could be tripped pretty easily if the motor was powered by some external force that made it end up spinning at >3600rpm. Maybe >~3600rpm in the direction that it’s being powered could be a better criteria for tripping.
Note: I’m using motor here to mean the part inside the V5 Smart Motor that actually spins, not the V5 Smart Motor itself.
I will grant that I was probably overly critical. I suspect my discomfort with the thread concept is best described by the word “disheartened” used by many. We invest a lot of time and effort to develop a community with highest expectation of integrity that is expected by of all engineers. Cutting corners in engineering can result is harm. In VRC I hope that we don’t overly focus on winning that causes people to feel they need to compromise integrity and professionalism.
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Thank you Taran. That’s exactly why I asked for this to be locked. Just anything to stop outwardly telling people how they can cheat.
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the IME is before the cartridge, unfortunately.
Well, human nature, culture, and history in general is pretty darn disheartening, depressing, and disappointing when you look at it realistically anyway. Breaking free of the illusion that this isn’t the case is in itself very uncomfortable, but it should be allowed.
What’s more is nobody here is knocking the RECF for their efforts to accommodate us and provide us a fair competition, they’re just looking at things critically with respect to what overly ambitious teams may do. And the reality of that may be disappointing.
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