International I Hate Sports Club

Yes - the World Solar Challenge. That IS very important work.

But, my word of warning is - WHY do they have to take important work
and try to turn it into a damned COMPETITION?

Do they think that competition is the ONLY or even the IDEAL way to optimize a technology?

It's wasteful, because it means N competitors are all working towards the same end,
but only 1 gets the prize, so N-1 competitors efforts don't yield a reward for them,
even though EVERYbody - including the winner - benefits from the "failures" of the others,
because it those failures are necessary to eliminate the non-working alternative.

Well, not in a purely capitalistic model. In a socialistic model, all N competitors would be rewarded for their efforts, because BEFORE the contest, none of the N knew which combination of nuts and bolts would lead to the optimal outcome. That is known - by all - only AFTERWARDS. ALL N competitors contributed to that knowledge, hence, all should receive a benefit.

One could still call this system of rewards a "competition", although that would violate universally-agreed-upon defintions of what "competition" means in game theory.

Wow resolvent, that's fascinating. I've never thought of the World Solar Challenge in Capitalistic vs. Socialistic terms before! Now I must admit here that I'm no political expert, and that I've never even heard of "Game Theory" before, so I must concede your superior knowledge on these subjects. But in my own simple way, just going on basic principles here, I may have stumbled upon some flaws in these theories. See what you think.

Dividing the available reward between all participants may well be part of a noble utopian goal, but in reality, reducing the first prize like that would diminish the incentive to compete, and may not attract the best field of competitors, and the problem at hand may not get solved as good as it could be. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

And the flip side to that of course, is that if all the competitors received an equal prize just for participating, then that would surely attract non serious participants just out for a piece of the prize, (the "Honeypot Effect"), and THAT would be wasteful. Human greed is a corrosive element to even the best laid plans, and so realistically needs to be taken account of, at some level at least, in any system of human activity.

Perhaps competition itself is neither good nor bad though. It seems that competition is all around us, and is just a natural phenomenon with no built in meaning. It's a bit like money in that it's not the thing itself that is positive or negative, but it's WHAT PEOPLE DO WITH IT that gives it a positive or a negative value. And so things that have a higher purpose to them, have a higher value. I think perhaps it's just that the knuckle dragging sports mad mob has given the word "competition" a bad name.

Competition, if attached to a higher purpose, can be a good thing. Don't forget, it was the "X Prize" competition that gave us "Spaceship One". Don't let the mindless masses hijack the English language - DON'T BELIEVE THEIR HYPE - LET'S RECLAIM THE WORD "COMPETITION" FELLOW SPORTS HATERS!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... prize.html