Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

To be clear: Ed's spreadsheet has separate per-team least-squares estimates of Auto, Climb, and TeleOp.

In general if a "well-scoring" machine is assigned the task of defending, it's often because the other two machines are higher scorers. In the least-squares analysis that is used to compute OPR, the defending machine gets credit for the alliance score.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

I guess another way of thinking of it is imagine this scene:
A: "How can we make our paper-based scouting better?"
B: "Let's use this OPR thing. It'll make us better than the opposition for sure!"

The problem in this scene is that nearly every other quality team is probably also augmenting their scouting with OPR. So in order to be scouting smarter than the opposition, you need to be thinking further than the numbers you can pull off the internet.


Essentially, the rising tide of more-available analytical tools has lifted everyone's scouting boats: everyone is scouting better because of it, but a given team is probably relatively in the same position vis a vis its competitors as it was before the advent of easy-to-use OPR data. So you need to use it, but to assume that it is the ticket to better-than-your-opposition picking may be a bad assumption.

Another hobby of mine is triathlons, where you see something similar: a new, faster bike will come out, and you'll buy it and use it just to keep up with your competitors. The speedier bike or technology doesn't necessarily move you up the rankings, since everyone else is using it - moving up still requires hard work and getting better.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

Shh, everyone knows that's a special Canadian trade secret.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

This. No matter how much we improve our automated analyses, humans still have to not only be in the loop, but control it. It might be interesting to find out if building your pick list strictly on OPR is better than just picking the highest-ranked available robot. I'm pretty sure it is, but without some actual, numerical, analysis I won't say that I believe it. ;)

Preposterous! This is 1114; they're not wasting time practicing with humans to stand in for Karthik's thumbs. They're building something.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

Tom, did you see the numbers on 2337. They had a respectable OPR of 44 but ranked 33 out of 64 teams. So they can be considered not the best offensive robot. Perhaps it is because they played a lot of defense. But did you see their CCWM number? It was 17.6 and ranked 11th out of 64 teams. 2054 and 67 made a wise choice. I doubt they did it because of the CCWM number, but you cannot deny that the CCWM number supports their scouts' decision. I had always advocated using CCWM as part of the sanity check for 2nd round pick. It does take defense into consideration.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

OPR fails at defense this year because defense in general hasn't been very effective. Those well scoring robots that have low OPRs due to playing defense would have been better off playing offense for all their matches because they are better at offense than defense. For playing defense to be a net gain, you have to stop more points than you would normally score.

Though the fact teams are playing defense when they really shouldn't is why traditional scouting is still important.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

I don't know why there is this constant argument of the shortcomings of OPR. I don't think anybody including myself advocate only using OPR/CCWM as a way to scout, decide on match strategy or alliance selection.

To me, OPR/CCWM is very useful if you were not at the event so you have a general idea what each robot is good at based on Auto OPR, Climb OPR and Tele OPR. Like Chris said, if you have actual data, why do you need OPR? I don't remember who it was, but I was once asked if I have the match data of each robot of every match, will I be able to create a better model to increase the prediction ability of OPR? I thought it was a trick question.

But we need to keep in mind that some teams are very small. One person cannot watch 6 robots at the same time. He/she can try and take some notes but it is very difficult to rank teams based on subjective measures on select matches. In those cases, I think it is better to use OPR/CCWM as a guide rather than selecting the next highest seeded team

Take a look at what teams actually select based on human scouts (I assume) at events and compare the first round picks with OPR and second round picks with combination of OPR/CCWM, it is amazing how good the correlation is and why some teams that seeded high were not selected. There are always exceptions because a team is looking for a very specific attribute in a supporting robot. But in some cases I have to scratch my head where it looked like a poor choice and very often the data confirmed that they ended up as quarterfinalist.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

Quoted for truth.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

Given that data, you could do better than just reporting each team's high/low/mean/median scores etc and using that for prediction.

You could take into account which teams they were playing with, and against, for each of their alliance scores, and so on, recursively for those teams. Computer ranking of football teams do something similar.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

It's occasionally beneficial to remind people that OPR/CCWM/Metric du jour are not magic bullets. You more than likely know it but freshmandood519 (which I'm hoping is NOT an actual user name on here) probably doesn't.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

That one's safe, but stupidfreshman is taken.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

I think one of the best cases of this OPR/Human scout difference was actually at the Buckeye Regional when we picked you guys. In my opinion, the biggest issue with OPR (and I was talking about this in the week 6 thread) is that it doesn't take into consideration improvement -- it's an average. So if a team has shooter troubles on Friday (like 2834) then gets their game on Saturday morning, their OPR would not be significantly improved. But human scouts can see and snag a second round pick that scores 60+ in a match.

On the other hand, at Buckeye, our first pick, 2252 was ranked 3rd in OPR but in the 20s seeding wise - and they were clearly one of the three best scorers at the event. There often isn't the type of correlation between rank and OPR as I'd like to see and OPR does a very good job of quickly highlighting which teams to watch carefully and look at their schedules to see if it was a particularly hard one.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

I am very glad you did not use OPR/CCWM for your second pick at Buckeye. OPR/CCWM does not take the order of the match into consideration so you do not know if a team is improving or the robot is starting to have problems. I use trendlines in Excel to fit a straight line through the data points of all previous matches score based on match scouting. Then I look at the OPR numbers and trendline predictions and decide on what I think each team will likely score in the next match. Using this to look for teams in alliance selection is better than just using OPR/CCWM, and you will not miss a team that showed big improvement on Saturday like at Buckeye. :)

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

I think OPR is a success, but if there is a way to play on a team's continuous improvement as the season progresses, say through elims and other events, that could give a more accurate preview on a team's performance.
I know that if you make each team's next event substantly more important than the first, the single and double regional teams would get nicked compared to the three regional teams.
The point is, however, that each team is accurately compared in offensive power rating to other teams, conistency included. In this case then, the more accurate average of a team should reflect more of there later regional/s then their first.
OPR is here to stay, but improvement should never relinquish.

Re: OPR after Week Seven Events
 

OPR/CCWM look like they would be a fantastic asset to FTC teams at the World Championships.

FIRST doesn't currently maintain a data set of matches for FTC the way they do for FRC. There are a few data sets available for FTC Championship tournaments, but not all. Generating a usable World ranking is probably not practical at this late date. Maybe next season.

It does seem that it would be possible to adapt this spreadsheet to FTC for use at just the FTC World Championships. Division lists are out for FTC.

I tried creating a new tab and entering a set of schedule & match data that I found posted from Alaska. I figured it would be a good test set. I'm not sure if I got the data entered in the propper format. The CTRL-SHIFT-R and CTRL-SHIFT-O both produces an error for a subscript being out of range. Unfortunately my Visual Basic is a bit rusty. It probably requires more than just a new tab. Probably need to tweak the macros for 2-team alliances as well.

What would it take to create an FTC version?