My read is that with the heightened emphasis on Engineering Notebooks this year, that G4 violations (possibly elevating to G2 and G1) will start to become more prevalent. I’m pretty sure Grant or James has mentioned seeing teams AT WORLDs that could NOT explain how their code worked, nor could they write code that (and I’m paraphrasing) could make their robot go straight and then turn right.
Please read G4’s iii clause which says that G4 still applies - TO BOTH teams. The robot and code must match the skill level of the teams competing.
Where the statement in red is:
Points ii and iii are intended to represent real-world situations that are found in industry engineering. If a vital member of a professional engineering team were to suddenly leave, the remaining members of the team should still be capable of working on / maintaining their project.
This is literally how things work. When a co-worker leaves a company or moves to another team, if the remaining members of the team are unable to maintain their former colleague’s work, bad things happen.
As far as code and templates go, this has been discussed:
The spirit behind all these rules is a couple things:
- To combat the “clone-bots”, especially where, say, a team of Seniors and a team of Freshman from the same org show up with the “same” bot and perform virtually identically but the Freshman are unable to explain anything about their robot to judges (or competitors, etc.), making it pretty clear that the Seniors made 2 robots and gave one to the Freshman.
- With the (new) emphasis on citations in the Engineering Notebook to force teams to document these collaborations, making it more clear how “balanced” the collaboration was. It’s one thing (IMO) for 2 teams to work together on a mech where each team is contributing equally and another thing more akin to the situation above.