Advance Knowledge of Bot Race Judge

[ezcodeslide]

It is my understanding that some bot racers know in advance who will be the judge for a bot race. Because there is a great deal of variance in how bot races are judged, and because recognizable judging patterns have arisen over time, the knowledge of who will be the judge in advance of the race represents an unfair advantage. A bot racer that knows in advance who the judge will be can tailor their report to receive a better grade by that judge. Bot racers that do not know who will judge the race are left at a disadvantage to the racers that do.

To level the playing field, I propose one of the following options:

1. No bot racer should be allowed to know in advance who will judge a race.
2. The judge for a race is known in advance to all bot racers at the same time. No bot racer would know before any other.

[CloudEllie]

You raise an interesting challenge.

• The only bot crews who have visibility on judge and lookout assignments are participants with the Judge and/or Lookout role.
• Judges and Lookouts are currently assigned via an RSVP process.
• Staff recently proposed a change to bot race processes to the bot crews, to allow Lookouts who are also bot racers to judge bot races in which they don't compete; I see this as desirable since Lookouts who compete in bot races are particularly well-equipped to judge them.
• One challenge is that there are relatively few people who have both roles (bot-crew and either Judge or Lookout), so there may be no way to completely avoid them guessing or deducing who the judge may be.

The team is giving some thought to how we might obfuscate the lookout/judge RSVP assignments, as I certainly understand your concern here. I don't love option (2) as it's almost certain to produce outcomes that game the awarding mechanism rather than providing value to sponsoring projects.

[DadeKuma]

This is the same issue that normal contests have (i.e., wardens do not know who will be the judge/lookout, but anyone who has the role has this info if they participate as a warden).

It's difficult to fix this due to how the RSVP process works. Hiding the RSVP of other judges/lookouts will influence many, as they use this info to choose whether they will judge/pre-sort a specific contest (e.g., if I don't see any activity in an RSVP channel, I am more inclined to give my availability).

[CloudEllie]

Staff have taken this concern under advisement and are retooling the process for assigning judge and lookout RSVPs to further obfuscate the final assignments. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!