Even in robotics (my area), if you are watching a video of a robot doing something cool, there’s often a bunch of times they ran the same demo and it didn’t work for some (often largely irrelevant to the main idea) reason. I also remember, in an undergrad analog circuits class, we had to build an amplifier on a breadboard with certain performance specs (e.g., a fairly high cut off frequency, etc.). This ended up being fairly difficult due to the tolerances in the components to which we had access and breadboard parasitics. I recall getting a non-trivial performance boost by swapping out a dozen 2n2222’s until we found “a good one.” The gray beard professor laughed and said that’s an expected part of our practical education.
