Frits has organized some give-aways with the intension to give all donors something back as a sign of gratitude.
But there are more donors than give-aways. So we need to make a selection.
Andrew and I have gathered all the names together of the people that donated to LMRv4.
Now we would like to have a robot that makes the selection for us. So this is a good reason to start a Robot Challenge.
Goal
The goal is to draw five winners out of all donors.
So here is my question to you:
What should be required from the Robot Challenge? What rules are needed? Can you give us an outline of a robot idea that has to be built to meet the given goal?
More detailed specification
The skill-level should be from beginner to advanced.
The robot must be able to make random selections from a pool of names. There are five prizes, and just in case we want to pull 5 alternate winners. So we need 10 names picked.
The rules for the drawing will be that the first name picked gets their choice of the prizes, the second name picked gets their choice of the remaining, etc. So the robot challenge must be able to support that.
Ideally, the winner of the challenge would have their robot pick the winners for the donor drawing on a live video stream (on YouStream, perhaps). This way we can watch the action live and also record it for later.
Just to expand on Nils’ post, the robot must be able to make random selections from a pool of names. There are five prizes, and just in case we want to pull 5 alternate winners. So we need 10 names picked.
The rules for the drawing will be that the first name picked gets their choice of the prizes, the second name picked gets their choice of the remaining, etc. So the robot challenge must be able to support that.
Ideally, the winner of the challenge would have their robot pick the winners for the donor drawing on a live video stream (on YouStream, perhaps). This way we can watch the action live and also record it for later.
Picking an item that physically contains the name of the donor may be a bit tricky.
Picking exactly one small piece of paper at a time may take a bit of fiddling to get right.
Putting each piece of paper in a more manageable object such as a ping pong ball or some other small/cheap container may be labor intensive for the organizer too.
So my two proposals are:
1. Make a robot that can throw a dice and possibly read it too (this could be easily done using a largish color coded dice, a photoresistor and a RGB led). The number generated by throwing the dice is then used as an index in the list of donors.
2. Print the randomized list of donors on A4 sheets so you can cover the floor of a room (maybe make a maze out of the pages? in the shape of LMR?) and have SHR type robot walk around randomly, placing markers on the names at random time intervals (could also make a mark with a sharpie). Each name should be printed on a sufficiently large area compared to the marker so that a marker is more likely to land completly within one name in order to reduce complaints. Maybe have a line sensor and make sure you don’t drop a marker on a line dividing the names - this could ba a bit too much though?
1. The challenger must set up a system that can pick a list of 10 names from a provided list. The list of names will probably be on the order of a few hundred.
2. The system must provide a way to determine the order in which the names were picked.
3. The system must be fair. (This may seem easy but it is hard to create a physical random number generator with a uniform distribution.)
4. The system must use an autonomous robot as part of the process of picking a name. Eg, if a dice is used, a robot must throw the dice, or read the dice, or BE the dice :).
5. The system must be as transparent as possible. Eg. A robot printing out a name on a lcd is not very transparent unless you can show how the code works step by step as the choice is made.
Ok, I know everyone should play fair here on lmr. I really trust you lmr people … however i think that somewhere on the cam there should be “somehing live”, like a clock, clouds, moving people etc. so we can exlude video editing/manipulation…
Thank you Antonio. I think this is the right abstraction level of rules. Precise enough to open the problem space but not to specific to narrow the solution space.
it should be a mechanical solution. throw a dart on a wall with all the names on a sticky note, throw a dice (assign names before the draw), the beads thing from IG, names in ping pong balls without outer markings and all the same color picked by a autonomous robot, all this is fine ;-)
oh…how about using the bipeds which are supposed to have a online football match in a death match? Group the donators and let them fight their prize. last standing robot wins and goes to the next stage.
