Bridge Building Competition #2 team photo. Photo by Sabah Al Ahmad Center for Giftedness and Creativity
When I organized the Bridge Building Competition, I spent a lot of time thinking about the bridges students would build. I did not expect that one of the more interesting problems would come from the rules themselves.
During judging, one bridge was questioned because its design would not allow a car to drive across it. The concern made sense from a practical perspective. A real bridge usually exists to move something from one side to another. But our rules never stated that a car, or anything else, had to be able to cross the bridge. We were evaluating the structures according to requirements we had already defined, and this was not one of them.
I stepped in because I did not think it was fair to introduce a new requirement after the bridge had already been built. The students had designed according to the rules we gave them. If functional use was important to the competition, then it was our responsibility to define what that meant beforehand.
That moment made me think differently about how rules are written. It is easy to assume that something is obvious because everyone involved in creating a system understands what was intended. But the people actually using that system only have what was written. The simpler and more precise the criteria are, the less room there is for assumptions to become requirements.
I have noticed a similar idea in science and engineering. A measurement, constraint, or requirement is only useful if it is clear what it actually means. The competition was a small example, but it made that idea much more tangible to me. Sometimes precision is not about adding more detail. It is about making sure the details that are there leave as little ambiguity as possible.
