5 ms·
This reminds me of a time in high school where I participated in a physics olympics competition. One of the events was to construct a bridge out of provided mat
by biot 14y ago
This reminds me of a time in high school where I participated in a physics olympics competition. One of the events was to construct a bridge out of provided materials capable of supporting the most weight. The score you received was calculated as:
(sum of weights supported) / (time taken to place weights)
The winning team placed a really small amount of weight in what the judges measured as 0.1 seconds of time. They cleverly gamed the rules to take advantage that a small time would act as a multiplier. Our team came in second for that event even though our bridge supported many times the weight theirs did, even if you took as long as you wanted to place the weights. It was a bit of an abuse of the rules and I felt it went against the spirit of the competition which was to engineer a solid bridge.
In this situation, by crippling potentially better drones the virus copter may have ended up technically winning but the measure by which it won may be different than what was intended. That said, it will definitely bring to the forefront a better approach to security which will have long-term benefits.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThe scoring calculation just needs to be tweaked a little. Presumably the goal is to prevent teams from building a fragile bridge that needs exceedingly delicate placement of weights. So perhaps something like: (sum of weights supported) / exp(time taken to place weights) Then, select units or add a constant such that you ensure contestants have a minute or two where the ramp-up of time penalty remains modest.
- cs702 14y agoI'm not sure your analogy applies in this case. The team that won the DroneGames HAD the BEST strategy: crippling the other drones! This reminds of a story I heard a long time ago about a fighter in the middle of some nasty civil war who complained to a TV reporter: "no one here respects the Law of The Jungle anymore!"
- biot 14y agohttp://dronegames.co/ http://dronegames.co/ doesn't state what the judging criteria is. If it's "survive to the end" then why not heavily shield your drone, bolt it to a fixed stand, affix a heavy EMP generator, and fry all the other electronics in the room? Your drone won't be able to do anything useful as it's bolted down but its shielding will at least allow the electronics to blink some lights and technically you could win on that fact alone. Presumably such a tactic would violate the spirit, which I take to be demonstrating cool and unique capabilities without having to deal with hostile threats. However, I haven't been following, so perhaps drone to drone interference is actively encouraged and expected.
- vidar 14y agoAs Mike Tyson said: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face."
- jjwiseman 14y agoI was there and as far as I know the drone didn't infect anything. In the end, I think he had to run amok.js manually on his own drone (substack, correct me if I'm wrong). This contest was a lot like the first DARPA Grand Challenge--There was a lot of crashing, and if anyone made it out of the gate/left the ground there was a lot of applause. I expect the next Drone Games will be like the subsequent Grand Challenge where the execution finally matched the ambition.
- bigiain 14y agoI'll bet the other team members have gone on to highly lucrative careers in consulting. The "spirit of the competition" is much like the "customer's objectives" - a concept to be completely ignored while scrutinizing the rules/specs to work out how to collect the prize/fee whilst doing the minimum amount of work.
- marblar 14y agoLet's hope next time they used: weight / ( 1 + time )
- IgorPartola 14y agoI did a similar thing in high school. The formula was different: weight * length. Thus you could build a long bridge (limited by amount of materials) and place very little weight. We did not win.