I mean, I don't hate it, but it's not innovative in the way it suggests it is. "There's nothing in the rules that says a dog can't play basketball." Yeah, but like, what are we achieving with it. Part of the fun of designing within constraints is figuring out different limits. I will say I often enjoy these "thinking outside the box" attempts the first time, but that after that initial thought, it's worth rewriting the rules, because you can only get so much out of consistently thinking outside the box in the same way.

"How far can a human launch a projectile?" is a different question from "how far can you throw a paper plane?" I'm okay with both of them being competitions, but they are meaningfully different and drive meaningfully different outcomes.

> Part of the fun of designing within constraints

In this example there were constraints, and they were designed within. You just don't like the result.

no, it's like when someone is following the law to the letter but not the spirit of the law. Aka finding a loophole. No one will laud this.

In this instance I'd say it's funny and a bit creative, but way less creative than the other participants trying to build actual paper planes.

I think all this achieve is proving to the people who wrote the rules they made a mistake. Rules will hopefully be updated, so value is not zero, but it's not really what the spirit of the competition was about.

The only instance I admire this thinking is when the "wrong" rules are not written by humans but rather preexistent. If someone manage to find out the understanding we had of the rules was wrong and finds a quicker solution because of it, that's amazing.

I didn't say I didn't like the result. In fact, I think I explicitly stated that I enjoy this kind of "out of the box" thinking, the first time.

Remember the time I beat the Kobayashi Maru?

Or, student wins paper airplane contest with paper rock.

Haha

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru