Re: How do you rank?
 

If this is to be used to rank the teams from the best one that won the most it would be great.

But I believe that ypu need to consider other factors when choosing who the BEST all around team, factors that would take hours and hours to find and calculate.

But still Good Job!

Re: How do you rank?
 

:D Did You read the first post???

It is not only based on winnings and loses it also takes into acount your opponents and your partners, if you look at the ranking you can see that teams that have less wins then another team can still rank higher then teams with more wins.

Dave

Re: How do you rank?
 

First, I would like to say thank you to Team 1251 for a job well done! The effort put into this ranking system is evident and the outcome is a very nice product useful to all teams. I have never been a big fan of the W-L-T/RP system that FIRST uses at the competitions especially with the RP based on the losing score/lowest un-penalized score. I have never really felt that it has been effective at accomplishing the objective. The FIRST system does not really seem to do a good job at ranking a team based on the strengths and weaknesses of the teams that you randomly play with and against. The system used in Team 1251’s relative power ranking does at least make an attempt at factoring in these strengths and weaknesses even if there is minor data entry errors discovered in team information. It is unfortunate that the raw data is unavailable from some of the early regional competitions. Without that we cannot really paint a complete picture. The FIRST W-L-T/RP system, however, is fairly straightforward and easy to compute rapidly at competitions. With this in mind I have a few thoughts, questions, and comments.

1) I am unclear as to if this relative power ranking system is (or can be) computed in near real time or is it something that takes quite a while to compute due to the interdependence of the power rankings of the teams at the competition. If a team was to supply corrected information for their particular team or even accurate data for a whole regional is it a big deal to update/compute the rankings after the data is entered? Once the “compute ranking” button is pressed are the results fairly immediate or is it more of a go get coffee come back and they are ready or more of a start it tonight before bed and they are ready in the morning kind of thing? Is this a system that could be used instead of the real time FIRST W-L-T/RP system for ranking teams at competition? Is it even appropriate?

2) How is the rank determined between teams with equal relative power rankings determined?

3) How difficult would it be to compute the same rankings (overall and per regional) without the elimination rounds being included? I would be interested to see how close this ranking system would be to the FIRST standings using the W-L-T/RP system after qualifications. Could it be a simple button on the web page to include or not include elimination rounds or even just compute the rankings both ways and display them side-by-side for comparison?

4) It would be helpful in the overall ranking page to also be able to see which regionals each team attended and the ranking points for that team at that regional in an additional column. For Example: 3, Archimedes, PINK, 233, 30, 3, 0, 97, FL=90 CO=99. This way you know Team 233 went to 2 regional competitions (FL and CO) and that they got relatively stronger. If this additional data were on the same overall page it would prevent a lot of jumping back and forth between pages.

5) The ability to sort by divisions at nationals might be helpful as well. This way you could get a short list of just the teams in your division.

6) With all the talk on CD about best, strongest, etc. regional competitions it seems like you have the data to compute a relative difficulty level of each of the regional competitions here as well. It would be an interesting statistical exercise.

Finally and most importantly, I want to say to all teams that numbers are just numbers. Don’t put too much faith in ANY ranking system. This ranking system at best points out which teams were relatively strong at the competitions they have already competed in. Use it as just that, an indication of what teams might be strong in Atlanta. Anything can and probably will happen in Atlanta. For those teams going to Atlanta please remember to have fun. Don’t get bogged down in the rankings. Relax, enjoy yourself, do the best you can, and remember that these are the things that make tomorrow’s memories.

Good luck to all teams going to Atlanta! With so many people traveling from so many far away places please travel safely.

Sorry for the long post!

-Chuck

Re: How do you rank?
 

Wow First off thanks to everyone for there imput especially for the last post very well put. The power ranking system has proven to be fairly accurate for us at the regionals we have been to. Hopefully it contines to be! A very special thanks to Sebas and Mr.Barriere for making this work and being so diligent about this thank you all very much.

Re: How do you rank?
 

While at UCF and Palmetto, we generated this data Real Time. After each match we'd add the data to the db, and then refresh the page to see the new results. One regional takes a little less than a minute to compute. You can generate results real time for multiple regionals on the site by selecting them on the right. 2 regionals takes a little over a minute. 8 Regionals is on the order of 4-5 minutes, 19 regionals takes 30 minutes. As you add more teams it increases the data hash exponentially and thus takes much longer. 50 teams isn't too bad, 700 is a little out rageous

This is quite rare with so much unique data per team, but in the even that they are exactly the same, it sorts by team number.

This is not difficult at all. I have the mechanism in place just hadn't generated the pages yet. With the multiple requests for this, I think I'll have to do that soon

This would be real hard to do real time, since the data changes dramatically each match, even when your team isn't even competing. But with static data like previous regionals, I should be able to store that data and output it .. would the "Relative Power" value be the number you'd like, or would the team rank be more appropriate?

I was trying to figure out a good algorithm to do this, haven't thought through it just yet.

This data must be cached somewhere in the program, it'd just be a matter of figuring it out. Maybe I should compute the win/loss percentage per regional and average margin of victory then run each regional through the program as if they were individual teams. That might have some interesting metrics ;)

Myself and the TechTigers whole-heartedly agree with this. Data is data, and statistics can be very misleading. As a Statistics minor in college, I spent much time analyzing data and recognizing falsehoods in the nature of the data. This is provided as a fun way to "measure" teams, but it is the unpredictable nature of the game that makes it fun to do this. FIRST does a wonderful job a leveling the playing fields with the game design and alliances. The only thing statistics are good for is predicting the past (and even that is arguable). We wish the best of luck to all teams at Atlanta, and are anxious to meet with you all there,

-Allen

Re: How do you rank?
 

That is about what I figured. It sounds like it is very feasable to do near real time at an individual event but the overall across the board rankings would have to be done as post event analysis. Which, of course, would work fine since at an individual regional I don't think teams really care how well another team at another regional is power ranked in real time anyway. So basically a system like this could possibly be used instead of the current FIRST W-L-T/RP system. The question now is is it really appropriate?


Hmm, something seems odd then about the rankings. For example in the overall rankings the first group with the same power rankings are ranks 10-12 (1305, 1024, 1466) with 88 points. Not really in any order that I can determine. Is there maybe a decimal something behind the 88 that we can't see? Not that it matters that much I am just trying to see how this might work at a competition.



I was thinking of this mostly from an overall scouting prospective before Atlanta Nationals so I would think it would only be run on the static data from previous regionals. I'm not sure which would be a better indicator now that you mention it. Probably the relative power I guess but maybe other folks have a better idea. I was just trying to think of a way to get a feel for if more of the top ranked teams went to multiple regionals, how much better they got from one to the next, etc.


It would also be interesting to look at the Atlanta Divisions statistically and see if there really is a harder division. Statistically I bet they are all pretty close.

-Chuck

Re: How do you rank?
 

Got bored and decided to play with the algorithm a bit. This is not for compiling data from FIRST's website but for a "while you're there" type approach, ie. scouts plugging in data during divisions to provide a sample of how each team is doing that day.

Share the thoughts, I did it real quick so I didn't expect too much accuracy in it. While my coding ability is extremely rusty, I don't think it's that much harder to implement, and possibly even easy for Excel to run.


2((Your win percentage) + 3(Opponents win percentage) + 3(Ally win percentage))/18 = x

x - (total amount of penalties/2.5) = y (ie: a 30 point penalty and and two 10 point penalties penalizes your power rating by 20!)

if(cancap==1)
o=3;
else
o=1;


(y + 20(avg capped a match) + 500(1/(seconds to cap))/o. = z

z = power rating

Before someone points out that having a high average caps a match and low capping speed go hand in hand, you're right...

...sorta. You see, too many robots have LOWER than their normal average capped a match because they are constantly attacking the back row, thus a HIGHER time to reload for the tetra. They could be averaging the same amount of caps for a much slower team simply because they are the offensive robot of the round, and including their time as a bonus aids this team's ranking. A robot that caps in 5 seconds that averages 5 a match will score HIGHER than a robot that caps in 8 seconds and averages 5 a match (unless the previous team has a worse win record)

My plan that will probably not happen because I'm far too busy: implement it, and prepare it so entering my scout's data Friday night will provide the list of the top teams in Galileo come Saturday.

Re: How do you rank?
 

I think that would be exciting data to see, but recording the "seconds to cap", counting the avg. capped per match, and figuring out penalties for 6 teams on the field might be an overwhelming feat .. we had a hard time just recording the scores at the end of the match, never mind count how long it took to load a tetra ...
-Allen

Re: How do you rank?
 

Ha ha... we're lucky to have a GREAT scouting team - 7 watching a match at any moment. One is general overview of match, the other 6 are watching one robot each. This makes that kind of data easier to record.

Re: How do you rank?
 

Good sheet, but if 330 is on there, I didn't see it. Also, no one from L.A. Regional is on the list unless they went to another regional. 330 is in Newton at nats.

Re: How do you rank?
 

He said that there were some regional information missing via the FIRST web site. I'm sure you'll end up on the next list if he does one for nationals.

Don't worry about not getting credit where credit is due - an interesting and cool ranking it is, but most important is seeing what you can do on the field in front of your divison's eyes. Go and show the field what you're made of, and they'll take note.

Re: How do you rank?
 

Well i am glad to see that we are the top 20%. Hopefully we will move way up, but lets just see what next week holds for us.

Re: How do you rank?
 

Good News, someone has contacted me with information for LA and Arizona. They are supposed to be putting it into a spreadsheet for me and I'll update the lists once I get it ...

thanks for all your help!
-Allen

Re: How do you rank?
 

This is for fun, on the field is really where it counts!

Re: How do you rank?
 

looks awesome :) (even though Team 1006 is listed by our FLL team's name, Cougar Roboteers. We're Port Perry Robotics.) Interesting though, I love it!