Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 27: The Perils of Inadequate Preparation

Confessions of an Automationeer, Part 27: The Perils of Inadequate Preparation

In the previous post I described how failure to conclude a CSR round satisfactorily and on time can have negative consequences for all involved, especially the entrants for that round. This is particularly galling for the winner of said round, who ends up being denied a review of his/her submission (along with a further explanation about why it won). But what if someone started a CSR round without giving enough consideration to the rule set it would use? This would lead to a very confusing and unnecessarily complicated contest, with many would-be entrants questioning the vague and/or convoluted requirements they would have to consider when building their next submission. Amazingly, it took 39 rounds for this exact situation to occur, and when it did, the resulting uproar led to a change of hosting duties stemming from the abandonment of that round - which was not entirely unexpected. So without further ado, I shall describe the events of this aborted round in further detail.

Back in CSR39 (details of which have been covered in an earlier post on this blog), the dust had barely settled from the previous round, and us Automationeers were chock-full of anticipation about what would come next. We expected something straightforward; what we ended up with was anything but. The host had given us a tuning contest, with cars separated into five classes, each with its own specific set of requirements. In addition to this, every car had to follow a universal rule set. But the real deal-breaker was the fact that lap times and top speeds were the only stats by which eligible entries would be measured. This went against the tradition established by CSR over several dozen rounds, and would have been much more appropriate for an actual racing challenge.

Moreover, closer inspection revealed the lack of balance between cars from different classes - some were clearly better than others. In fact, whereas all previous CSR rounds depicted an imaginary buyer searching for a car that would fulfill his/her requirements, this one did not, which served as another red flag. In the end, the host abandoned the round after realizing that, despite his best efforts, he had failed to devise a theme that was not at odds with the basic premise of CSR. Fortunately, the round was immediately restarted, with a new host and theme, and this time it was started and finished without incident.

Unbelievably, CSR59 - the latest iteration of this contest - ran into a similar problem, which was unsurprising given that this round deviated too much from the regular guidelines of CSR. It revolved around restoring badly modified classics back to their original state, with the cost dependent on the base car's age, its pre-markup price and the difficulty of the modifications required to revert the car to its stock trim, but the guidelines were too vague for the round to make as much sense as originally intended. Much to my relief, the host for this round decided to replace the convoluted rule set with a simpler one. Here's hoping that, in every subsequent round, the host gets the rule set absolutely right the first time, if only to ensure that future rounds of CSR are always on schedule. So let these examples be reminders that hosting even a single round of CSR is guaranteed to require a great deal of preparation and foresight.