Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

Only Michigan gets to create about a dozen threads for the Michigan State Championship in the wrong subforum without anyone calling them out on it <3

Mostly because if provoked, Michigan robots WILL hunt you down, and they shoot to kill. Or something.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

Yes. When 67 takes dead aim, you'd better get your pool noodles up, quick. ;)

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

Our robots are actually an army and the full court shooters are like our assassins. In the robot uprising the Michigan FCS Infantry division will be the ones that are used to decapitate all the resisting forces.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

And the robots with floor pick-up will clean up all the evidence. No witnesses.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

Considering that "Nationals" doesn't exist, it is, logically both the most and the least competitive of all events.

Semantics aside, I believe that, overall, the Championship competition will be more competitive, while MSC is almost certainly higher scoring.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

To add some numerics to this subject: Attached is a scatterplot of FRC all the events played so far this year.
The two District Championships outperform all of the standard events by a large margin on both average team performance and competitive balance.
If the past is any guide, http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2711, the CMP divisions will fall somewhere in the gap between the MAR event and best of the regular events (Bedford, Pine Tree).
The IRI, as always, will surpass everything that comes before it.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

And the data is in! :)

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

I have watched many events through webcast this year, and when I was watching the Michigan state championship, I was in the library of my school, and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time, I even cheered a few times until I got yelled at, what an awesome event

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

Could you elaborate on what Signal / Noise Ratio is in this context, and how it is calculated?

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

To be fair, I think the District championships are more closely related to IRI than regionals. They just use a scoring system to pick which teams are worthy to attend.
The week before I was in Chicago and there were three teams who were not ready to compete from the get go because their robots were illegal (last years specs). In fact there were several teams that struggled to make it to the field on a consistent basis for some reason or another that oft times had nothing to do with the robot. There were no such robots at either district final. Those type of teams were weeded out during the earlier weeks.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

Signal to Noise Ratio is used a lot in engineering methods were physical phenomena are measured for quality. It is used in communications, electonics and recently is used a lot in quality methods to measure the quality of processes and components. SNR (or S/N) is a logarithmic value measured in dB.

It turns out that methods for measuring quality in the world of Engineering and Manufacturing can be easily applied to sports. Another great opportunity for crossover learning in the world of STEM/FRC.

SNR give you a ratio of variabliy compared to the level of the signal you are measuring. In this case I am using Average Event OPR as the measurment of interest. The higher the SNR value, the more "competatively balanced" the event is, meaning that the distribution of the capability of teams is tighter than at an event with a lower SNR value.

Example, Compare Central Valley with Alamo. Both have nearly identical average OPR numbers for the event, (15.4, 15.2), however the distribution of OPRs for the teams at Alamo was much broader than at Central Valley.
What this a higher SNR means is that the event not likely as dominated by a few good teams, but instead was much more balanced competitively.

On these scatter graphs, Higher is means better overall event scoring ability, points to the right have better competitive balance.

I plan to write a paper on this, if I can ever find the time.
I use this same method to measure many factors in FRC competitive analysis, from the quality of individual teams, team quality growth over time, game design comparisons, and more. Fun with math.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

The point of IRI is to see the most instense competition of the year, thats why you have to be crazy good to get in...

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

So what is it, the standard deviation of OPR in dB or something similar?

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

S/N = 10 * Log ( Average^2 / StdDev^2 )
This is a standard formula from Signal Processing and related fields.

Events with tighter grouping will have a higher SNR.
Images below depict this graphically.

Re: ONLY AT THE MICHIGAN STATE CHAMPIONSHIP
 

The great thing about IRI is that you lack the exclusivity of MAR or MSC - that is, you have the best MAR and Michigan teams plus the rest of the best from the rest of the world. It's absolutely no contest that IRI is far more competitive than either of the regional championships. With that said, comparison between Divisional competition and Einstein vs. MAR or MSC eliminations can certainly fluctuate. Take, for example, the eliminations in 2011. I can't speak to the rest of the divisions, but eliminations on Galileo were fairly intense, but the #2 alliance of 254, 111, and 973 won handily, and were hardly challenged on Einstein. Except for one match in the Galileo finals, there were no upsets and very few close matches. In that year, at least, I would consider MSC's elims to be far more exciting (Whenever a #8 seed alliance can upset a #1 alliance like 217, 469, and 201 can be upset, you know the event must be deep). That said, neither events held a candle to the IRI.