Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

While most rounds have been low scoring, the ThunderChickens (217) have been consistently scoring 5 or more on the top row, including a round of 7. It does look like defense is going to be important (which is good for us since we've burned up 3 of the banebots 540 motors so far and have pretty much scrapped our arm). There are some interesting ramp designs, as well, but many teams seem to be having difficulty in the endgame either deploying their ramps or getting on to other teams ramps.

Well, 3 hours to the fun begins. Good luck to all.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

Go to college in St. Louis, Kyle, and come back as a volunteer or a mentor! :cool:
(Just don't forget that you'll be a student first, and students must learn, and they are measured by their grades.)

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

Wow.. 45 and 148 are going nuts!

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

How is the lifting of the robots going? I've been watching the VCU regional and it is mainly scoring of tubes. Teams seem to be having problems climbing teams ramps. Are teams doing any better in St. Louis?

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

Match #39 just had teams 1315, 148, 2133 scored a combined 7 on the lower racks for 128pts. The Thunder Chickens were on the other alliance and scored 2 by them selves.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

Does anyone else think this match schedule is weird!?!?

I mean, 148 goes against either 217 or 45-- everytime. It looks like the same initial block of matches being run over and over.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

I wondered if anyone has any vids that they have encoded of the heavy hitters at this regional. I love the feed so i can see what is going on, but I would love to see some of the intricacies of the teams discussed in this thread (45,217, etc, etc)

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

I agree, not just for 148 but there are a few other teams out there that never get to play with any of those teams (148, 217,45), they're always against them multiple times. The randomness of the schedule didn't work out well this time around.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

148 also always has a rookie partner. Not only that, but every team with a 2 or 3 digit number always plays with 2 other 4 digit numbers. There also isn't a single match with all 6 teams being 4 digit numbers, which should happen about 10% of the time.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

From talking with some people here, I've been told that the scoring system is not working correctly for match generation. Teams complained about the match schedule but supposedly FIRST said there's nothing they can do about it.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

I hope they have fixed by next week....

or if they don't, I hope were stuck with 330:)

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression, Dave. What FIRST actually told me is that this is the way the algorithm is supposed to generate matches, and there is no means to vary the match-ups. So the intent seems to be that low numbered teams will alternate playing each other. I was told this is not a defect in the system; matches come out that way because that is the algorithm that FIRST specified.

Several people who have been recognized as sources of inspiration to the FIRST community have told me that this match generation system seems unfair, and I concur. I understand that these feelings will be communicated in a respectful manner to the appropriate people at FIRST, probably within the next few days.

On a related note, the scoring system worked flawlessly today at St. Louis -- no crashes, no restarts, no lost data, no delays. We finished about four minutes ahead of schedule, and the only (relatively minor) problems encountered were due to human error.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

It's the way FIRST wants it to be, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a defect in the system from the point of view of many of the veteran teams. :p
Again, it worked as designed, but one specific feature could be considered a flaw by the users even though it's exactly as FIRST specified: it takes serious intervention to correct a match score after the fact.

But there haven't been any noticeable glitches in the system. It all seems to be working exactly as FIRST wants it to, and that's good.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

It'd be interesting to know what the spec really said. I would think the intention would have been to "prefer" setting up low number teams to play each other, but I doubt that they really wanted to have the same teams play each other over and over and over.

As I see it, there's a defect here one way or another. It might be an implementation defect or it might be a requirements defect, but either way I can't see how the current situation could be considered "desired" behavior (certainly isn't to me and clearly a lot of others as well).

The other interesting thing about this is that it means FIRST is assuming that lower-numbered teams are somehow better. While there might be some truth to this when all the teams across the country are averaged, it would seem to seriously penalize low-numbered teams who aren't so good, or perhaps have had a rebirth and despite the team's overall age are basically rookies. The converse is also true for very young teams that happen to be very good (and are sometimes that way because they're essentially made up of a bunch of people from veteran teams).

Seems like this is probably a case of good intentions gone awry. Hopefully it can be fixed and we can move on.

Re: 2007 St. Louis Regional
 

As I understood the explanation from the guy who designed the system, this is exactly what is supposed to happen. The alliances in a match are supposed to be closely matched in terms of total experience. So a ten year team is paired with maybe a two year team and a rookie. The average experience would then be around four years. They would wind up laying against either a similar alliance or maybe three three or four year teams. Further, the goal of the alogrithm is to have all of the matches have very similar "average ages".

This is an interesting idea and is similar to what AYSO and some other youth sports organizations do in assigning teams. They attempt to spread out the top ranked players so that the teams are close in ability.

I think the problem might be that the distribution of team ages is not uniform. There can be huge gaps that a dumb algorithm will not be able to account for. Another factor is that there is more room for adjustment when you are working with 13 or 14 individuals than when you only have three. Or they might be trying to work with too small a "window" for an acceptable match. There are a lot of ways for something like this to go wrong.