SARAWAK

What is Hebocon?

Hebocon is a sumo tournament for robots made by people who have no ability to make robots. Two machines are placed in a small ring and pushed at each other until one falls over, falls out, or stops working. Usually all three.

It was started in Japan by Daiju Ishikawa, a writer at the Japanese humour site Daily Portal Z. The name comes from heboi — Japanese slang meaning crap, feeble, poor quality. That is not an accident of translation. Badness is the specification.

Incompetence is the aesthetic

Most robot competitions reward engineering. Hebocon rewards its absence. A robot that reverses when you tell it to go forward is a better Hebocon robot than one that does what it is told. A robot that falls over unprompted is better still.

This is enforced, not merely encouraged. Anything that looks like real engineering — a microcontroller, a sensor, remote control, anything that suggests the builder knew what they were doing — is a High-Tech Penalty and costs you points every match. The rules are designed to punish competence.

The result is that the audience is not watching a contest of skill. They are watching people fail in public, on purpose, with an enormous amount of tape.

Who it is for

People who have never built anything. Children, parents, retirees, art students, people who tried once and gave up. If you have a functioning knowledge of motors and gear ratios, you are welcome, but you will be at a disadvantage and everyone will enjoy that.

Sarawak's chapter

Hebocon spread by being deliberately unownable. There is no licensing fee and no franchise agreement — you run one by running one. Hebocon Sarawak is a community chapter under that model, organised locally, with no claim to represent the global event.