Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

My bad. Didn't do enough research on the rest of the teams.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

For the PNW, Auburn Mountainview has been a competitive event in its existence, but Philomath this year seems to be the strongest for 2016.

Usual Contenders:
CV Robotics [955]
Wildcats [1510]
Spartan Robotics [997]
Hotwire [2990]
Skynet [2550]

Joining this year: (This is where it gets really scary)
Shockwave [4488]
Skunkworks [1983]
IRS [1318]
Bear Metal [2046]
Lion Robotics [2907]

And still only 28 spots filled :ahh:

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I would agree regarding Philomath in the PNW. This is going to be interesting. I would expect a lot of people will be watching this event as a pre-cursor to District Championships :yikes:

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

GTR-E has to be one of the, if not the most competitive regional this year.

You have THREE Einstein teams from just last year in 1114, 2056, and 1325.

There are three World Champions from past years in 610, 1114, and 1241.

You've got the teams on the alliance that upset the Sim/Dave alliance in 2014, teams 1285, 2198, and 4476, eliminating them in the Semi-Finals.

1310 is a local powerhouse that gets invited to IRI year after year. Not to mention 2056 who are yet to loose a regional.

This will be a really great regional to watch, and take part in, with an elevated level of play.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I know it's a new Regional, but Rocket City in Huntsville, AL looks pretty strong.
These are the registered teams who have either won or been runner up at an event within the last 3 years:

16, 79, 118, 343, 364, 456, 624, 801, 1251, 1539, 1706, 1902, 2783, 3490, 3959, 4188,

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

I'll have to put that one on my list of livestreams to watch. I was a little worried about 2056's streak once I saw the list for Waterloo... especially with 148 making an appearance.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

It is great to see that Philomath is going to have a deep set of teams to draw from.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Well, they were fine when 254 decided to visit in 2014, so, barring things I'm unaware of (of which there are many), I don't see 148 being in the mix shaking up 2056's chances of keeping their streak alive significantly.

There are a lot of ways to quantify "competitive". To me, it boils down to two questions: How difficult is it to win an event and how difficult is it to play Saturday (or Sunday) afternoon at an event. I'm not sure what the best way to quantify each of those is (and I'm pretty sure better minds than mine have tried), but it seems to me that one could come up with a number of statistics that might correlate to "competitiveness" at a regional.

I'm also not sure many of the previous posts in this thread are what I would say are most competitive overall. Perhaps in a given region, yes, but I wouldn't be likely to put one of our MN regionals on the same level as many Michigan District events, or even Wisconsin Regional, which always seems to be very deep, even if the ceiling isn't as high as places like Waterloo. It's quite difficult to make a judgement on the whole however, when I, like many people, only really have a strong knowledge of regionals in my area.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

No, 148 will definitely shake up OP's chances. In 2014 there was a little bit of luck that went their way to keep 2056 on the winning streak. Namely, the fact that 4039 seeded first and picked Simbotics allowed 254 and 2056 to pair up. In many other situations, 254 and 1114 could have paired up and ended 2056's streak. Not to mention, if 148 had come to Waterloo this past year and 1114's canburglars were better, then the two probably would have paired up.

I'm sure 2056 is up to the challenge and excited to fight for another regional win this year at Waterloo.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

This is one of those questions I've been trying to figure out for a while. So, I've actually built out a system to provide what I'm calling a Dynasty rating for teams. It's effectively based on the team's ability to play in the afternoon. I've assigned winning an event as 100 points. From there, each level is divided by the number of alliances reaching it. (Finalist 50, SF 25, QF 12.5) I also reverted towards the mean by 5% each year to help offset teams that had a great year in like 2006 and haven't been consistent.[1] I've also added a minimum threshold of 5 events, teams are derated accordingly prior to that because they are unknown. So, my theory is that this shows an overall ability to play in eliminations.[2] These were averaged over a year.

After that I started asking myself how I could quantify competitiveness of an event. Frankly, I enjoy watching an event where the winner isn't a known thing[3]. So I did a bit of research, for those of you unfamiliar with the Gini Coefficient, it's a measure of income disparity in nations. But, at it's core, it's a measure of equality of distribution. So, I got to wondering if I could leverage the math behind it to find events with lots of close teams.


Ok, this post is dragging on a lot longer than I wanted it to, so the TLDR - you can, it's actually fairly simple math given a sorted array. So, by week, the most "exciting"[4]:

(If they were real close (within a hundredth) I included the top 2

Week 1
Week 2
Week 3
Week 4
Week 5
Week 6 [5]

This was all based on every official event from 2006 to present. [6]


I'm tired, but if folks want the other order I can do that tomorrow.

[1] Number felt right, not really based on much than the that.
[2] Spot checking teams felt right. In theory there's prolly a way of using this for Fantasy FIRST type stuff.
[3] Almost known thing... whatevs
[4] Read as, events with the lowest Gini coefficient since 0 would be perfectly equal distribution.
[5] Actually, NCCMP was flagging as the most even this week, but since it's a qualify only event I assume it's a TBA bug?
[6] Which surprises absolutely nobody that I have...

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Andrew, would that be possible to do for Regionals?

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Additionally, 2056 lost 2/3rds of their non IRI off seasons. While there's a huge difference between on season and off season, they're human and have the ability to lose just like everyone else.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

Note not only close competition at Hartford,
But Hartford has 10 of 38 competitors that were in eliminations at championships last year, and second to top on average qualification score of all regionals or districts - so competitive and at a high level. None of the super-star teams maybe (is 195?), but solid to the core.

Interesting analysis Andrew.

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

My lists for a couple regionals were definitely a bit biased since I know the local teams/powerhouses better.

I agree. The presence of 148 will shake 2056's chances of continuing their win streak. We definitely can't make accurate predictions now since we don't know what the game is and what their robots are on a competitive level, but we can guess. Regardless Waterloo will be a fun regional to watch!

Re: Strongest Regionals/District 2016?
 

What I'm saying is that pretty much every regional 2056 is at has a whole bunch of competitive teams at it. Ontario isn't lacking in the high-quality teams department-- a decent amount of those teams that 2056 regularly beats would be dominant at other regionals.

Throwing another excellent team in the mix like 148 doesn't (in my opinion) shake things up much further. OP is already fighting a losing battle with probability-- eventually something is going to come along to break their streak, whether 148, 254, or any other powerhouse is there or not.

Andrew-- That's a very interesting approach to the problem, and definitely reinforced what I was thinking about "competitiveness" not necessarily being in conjunction with the number of big-name teams present.