[hoseja]

And that's bad, how? Is it a sport (where the optimal amount of luck is non-zero) or a scientific study? Also just make them run multiple mazes then. I tend to think of sport fundamentally as simulated warfare, the further you go from the mess of reality in pursuit of fairness and justice, the less worthy the endeavor becomes.

[tjoff]

Reducing luck is bad, how?

There are scales of it, reducing luck in the sense that you don't require a perfect course. That a speck of dust ruins your run etc. is, within reason, part of the game. But flying blind into a maze and just randomizing your way through it isn't particularly challenging. Just enter the game with a 100 identical robots and you'll have a better chance at winning.

Multiple mazes isn't a bad idea, but a massive endeavor just increasing the barrier for these competitions to take place.

>... the less worthy ...

Why? The most noble sport is a lottery then? Because that is essentially what you would turn this competition into.

[hoseja]

No, I don't think random pathing is the best algorithm for maze exploration. Doing best possible with limited information in real environment should be the meat of this competition, not having all the time time to leisurely map the entire regular gridded space and then hyperoptimize a solution based on specific behaviour of tiny wheels on flat cardboard surfaces. Boston Dynamics robots can do backflips nowadays. As I said, I consider _some_ luck better than no luck or all luck. Entering with 100 identical robots... you'd have to actually build all of them, people would shun you and I'm sure nobody would be against a rule against that.

edit: But the accessibility argument is probably valid, yeah. There should be a higher less artificial league then, or something.