Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Actually, of the week two regionals I've looked at, I think LA had the best schedule. It's too bad it takes so much effort on the part of the regional organizers to weed out bad "random" schedules. The folks who graciously donate their time to run regionals shouldn't have to do work that could be done automatically.

On a related topic, I do have a question about surrogate teams that a regional organizer might be able to answer. From reading the "Tournament" part of the manual (section 9.3.2), it sounds to me like there should only be surrogate teams in the last qualifier match to round out the final match, so I would expect at most 5 surrogate teams. However, all of the schedules that I've looked at for regionals when the teams aren't a multiple of 6 show many more than this, sometimes more than half of the teams. It looks like the scheduling algorithm pads out every round, rather than having matches that mix the last teams getting their first match with the first teams getting their second match, etc.

This seems odd to me, to have so many extra matches, which also make keeping a minimum gap between successive matches more difficult. It doesn't seem bad to me to put the last robots getting their first round against the the first robots getting their second round. All those teams get to scout and make robot improvements during the previous matches.

Is there some reason why it's bad to mix rounds slightly at the edges, assuming the schedule does a good job of giving teams time between matches?

Is there official FIRST policy about this beyond what's in the manual? If every round is padded, how do teams know when they are playing a match as a surrogate? Is it just their last match that doesn't count? If that that's the case, then padding all of the rounds doesn't avoid round-mixing and just adds extra matches that don't count.

I'd like to add this to my scheduling algorithm and want to get it right.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

The last round was the only one with surrogates. For the surrogate teams their "throw out" round is always the last match. It is indicated on the schedule if you know what to look for but it is not obvious. Even so the teams I mentioned it to seemed to know about it. Because our "extra" teams were all in the "rookie" group we only had one team on a side that was playing "for real" in the last few matches.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

I was just checking up to see if the scheduling issue with the extra surrogates was resolved*. I didn't find any more instances of that problem, which is good.

What I did find, however, was that the team standings from Florida indicate that all teams except 1875 and 1694 played 8 matches. According to the team standings, 1694 played 7, and 1875 played 6. Now, of course, I checked the match results to verify this, and in fact, those teams are listed as playing 8 times each. So what happened? Is the software is interpreting a DQ/no-show as not having played the match (which could affect the rankings, depending on how it's handled internally)? Since I don't know the unpenalized scores, I can't deduce if the ranking score is the result of 8 matches, or of fewer.

Similarly, at GLR, 226 and 519 are both listed as having played 7, when 8 was the norm. 519 actually played 8, according to the match list, but 226 played 9. Does anyone have statistics from GLR to cross-reference against the published standings? Also, with 59 teams, we should be seeing 2 surrogates; who were they?

And in Brazil, 1621 is listed for 9, but played 10. Also, though it's due to an oversight in the rules, technically there should have been an all-surrogate match played, because the number of teams (15) is indivisible by 6, but the product of the number of teams and the number of matches per team (15 × 10 = 150) is divisible by 6. (A better solution would be to correct 9.3.2 to eliminate the useless match that is called for in this situation.)

In L.A., 8 matches was the norm; 702 is listed for 7, but played 9. Also, who were the 4 surrogates?

In Wisconsin, 8 matches was the norm; 1525 and 1103 are listed for 7, but played 9. And there would have been 4 surrogates.

In Louisiana, 11 matches was the norm; 462 was listed for 10 but played 12, and 2190 was listed for 10 but played 11. I presume that 462 was the lone necessary surrogate.

Maybe all of this is due to errors creeping into the match data after the fact, or maybe it's due to a non-intuitive way of displaying disqualifications. It's probably worth a look, just to make sure that the teams with strange numbers of matches aren't having their rankings miscalculated.

*The published match results at St. Louis indicated that several extra matches were played with all 6 teams being surrogates, in excess of the number required by 9.3.2. And 9.3.2 is itself excessive in cases where the number of teams is indivisible by 6, but the product of the number of teams and the number of matches is divisible by 6—like the 45 teams playing 8 times each at St. Louis; it calls for surrogates, even when they aren't required to construct a self-consistent schedule.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

With 52 teams playing 8 rounds, you only need one match at the end with four surrogate teams completing the last round for two teams. But the LA schedule had the last four matches, each with two scored teams plus four surrogate teams. I can't understand how that makes sense!

I'm afraid to see what was happening at the regionals with half of the teams playing surrogate rounds...

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Well said Alan!
And another point I would like to add, besides advantages and disadvantages to match play.......our team didn't spend all those weeks with blood sweat and tear, just so that we could play the same teams over and over again. Why have a regional with 60 teams if we only see less than 10% of the field. Shouldnt we play with as many different teams as possible?

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Having been to GLR last week, I am really anxious to see what FIRST has in store for the Boilermaker and all other 3rd week regionals. All I can say is good luck to everyone and may the best robot/strategy/driver/team/alliance come out on top

Court

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

The extra surrogate teams seem to be a function of the A/B/C pooling scheme. At GLR the pools were 19 teams in A, and 20 each in B and C.

(59*8)/6 = 78 2/3, indicating that all teams could get their 8 matches in 79 games, with 2 surrogates. Instead they played 80 matches, with 8 surrogates. These were teams 57, 65, 67, 201, 226, 308, 313 and 406, all from Pool A.

I believe "played" in the standings is less than the number of times the team appears in the match schedule because of no-shows (not even a human player) to the field, or because of DQ's.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

I've added a Beta release of my scheduling program to our web site. It's a console app so you have to run it from the command line. There are versions for Windows and Mac OS X. To get the beta, scroll to the bottom of the white paper.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Some of this "random-ness" didn't seem to be occuring at Midwest. 1525 never played 71, and a few other teams, and was matched against Motorola 111 3 times, and played with 858 3 times, and against 858 once. There wasn't any real problems with the time between matches, but we just didn't play quite a few teams on the field.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

At SVR it appeared that the A/B/C segregation was still in effect, as 190 never played with 8, 100, 114, 115 or 254. 971 also played 3 rounds against 254 (none with) and 3 rounds with 1970 (none against). Overall, however, the pairings seemed a lot better than it had been

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

It probably wasn't too bad for the most part. But 115 had an uphill battle the whole way, I remember that 114 was our opponent for 3 of our 8 matches all 3 of which we lost, one of those we had to sit out while installing a replacement gearbox from 488.

Re: "Random" match Schedules
 

Team 123 was paired up with team 314 five times in the Pittsburgh regional
it was good for us because we won all the matches
we won pittsburgh and detroit regional this year