Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

Are we going to see 300+ this weekend? Can't see how 1114 + 2056 + ____ won't cross that.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

wow... 252 just put up... im VERY impressed with the level of competition at waterloo

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

1114's qualification average is now higher then the old world record high score.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

5406 is a phenomenal rookie team.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

Here's HD full-field footage of the record-breaking match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTz0ezZKMHQ

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

Closer view with some full field and live scoring here.http://watchfirstnow.com/archives/122770292

Thanks Bochek! As always I love the quick match uploads and live video feeds from watchfirstnow!

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

I would say that they are phenomenal for any team!

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

Makes me wonder: Has anyone out there tried writing a better scheduling app? Were you successful?

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

FMS uses the same scheduling algorithm this year it has in the past: MatchMaker. The output of the algorithm shows the number of unique partners and "opponents" (which doesn't matter this year), and the scorekeeper makes sure they're all the same. This is harder to ensure at small events, especially when the algorithm also prioritizes a gap between teams' consecutive matches. It's typically common for a few different schedules be generated until the output is even, again especially with smaller events. Or, a schedule could be selected to try and have the teams who haven't passed inspection play their first match as late as possible, to make sure they can pass. So there are a lot of variables that go into generating a schedule, and sometimes these anomalies sneak through while selecting for other things.

While FIRST probably could have had IdleLoop update MatchMaker for this year and treat "opposing" robots the same as different matches, it probably wasn't worth the time/money/testing and they instead went with what was already known to work pretty well. Go figure.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

I can't be the only one who's noticed the sheer depth of this field.

29th seed in Waterloo has a QA high enough to be 4th alliance captain at Palmetto in week 1. Or 2nd alliance captain at NYC.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

To be fair, part of that is Waterloo and part of that is week number. Waterloo's #29 (of 30) 57.1 QA would get you #32 of 39 in Central IL right now, #35 of 39 at Purdue, #39 of 40 at West MI, and #40 of 40 at St. Joe's. Yes, last place out of 40. Now that's nuts (#39 has 57.33).

I'm also not sure that QA is really a good proxy for depth, particularly after teams have played 10 matches in a field of 30. (The other events are at 8-9 matches each now--round of applause to the Waterloo field crew.) I haven't done any math to that effect, but Waterloo actually has the lowest #25 OPR of the events I mentioned, losing to next-to-last Central IL by almost 10 points (18.41 to 27.58).

Without knowing, I'd suspect that QAs might be less about depth all the way through and more about the density from the top being spread through their qual alliances. And it is really, really dense at the top: the #1 OPR at St. Joe's would put you #5 at Waterloo. I'd be interested in a fuller analysis, though. Let me think about the stats options.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

The cost function used by MatchMaker already prioritizes maximizing the number of partners over maximizing the number of opponents.
In my experience in the District model it's not a good idea to run MatchMaker several times since you're introducing more bias by manually selecting for specific features.

Matchmaker does a very good job for typical regional sized events, where the set of reasonable solutions is fairly large, but it does not perform as well as smaller District sized events. I've played around with several other scheduling algorithms with some success for Districts where having a fixed number of qualification rounds makes it possible to pre-calculate much of the schedule.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

Waterloo is always one of my favourite events to watch, but this year's event is even more spectacular than usual.

It's very impressive how easy Q20 looked. If that's a preview of top level division play at Worlds, it's going to be fascinating, if not the most exciting for a casual spectator.

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

Here are the elimination alliances:

Re: 2015 Waterloo Regional
 

I've often wondered if the scheduling problem could be formulated as linear program and solved with a large LP solver.