JacobBlog!

“Why Science/Engineering?” Essay Idea!

In attempting to ascertain the composition of the person’s psyche, it is often productive to hear his or her complete answer to a specific question. For me, the most telling query is perhaps a bit unorthodox: “Who is your favorite superhero?”

My answer? Phil, the protagonist of Groundhog Day. What? Yes. He was an ordinary man who one day awoke to find himself trapped in a universe with an intriguing peculiarity in its time dimension: every morning, the same day would repeat itself exactly. I admire him because of what he made of this predicament: by analyzing the initial conditions and results of his past actions, he was able to put himself in the right places at the right times to achieve his goals. He had no superhuman powers – only his intellect and an intuitive understanding of the scientific method – yet eventually was able to exploit the properties of his “looping” universe to save lives and master many skills.

Fundamentally, this is what researchers do. It is also what I have tried to do  for essentially all of my life. By deeply understanding various quirks of a challenge (or a system that behaves unexpectedly), it is frequently possible to find a clever way to overcome it.  This is my favorite way to do so.  So in eight years of robotics competitions, I’ve never attempted to complete a task in the expected way – in fact, it is for the joy of attempting the unorthodox that I compete in the first place.  Just recently, in the 2009 Botball competition, each team had to deliver a number of items to a given set of destinations across the board. Our team was allowed two separate robots. After carefully reviewing the rules and measuring the distances on the board, I suggested that we evaluate the expected value of the strategy of sending one robot to block the opposing team’s scoring zone instead of assigning them both to the task of collecting objects.  It was higher than the conventional. Nothing prohibited this, so we implemented the strategy over the next six weeks and used it to win first place in the head-to-head double elimination tournament in all of the Southern California [video clip]. This year, I was elected to co-head the 2010 team.