The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

I've been trying to come up with a good statistic with which we can approximate the aggregate of the various abilities of each robot this season. It is a hard problem because of the many different approaches to this years' game. I think we will see fast scoring bots who falter, and simple drivers that win blue banners. But everyone has one goal in mind: to maximize the differential between points scored and points allowed.

In hockey, there is a somewhat obscure stat called "Plus-Minus" (+/-) that attempts to quantify the disparity between the number of goals a team scores when a player is on the ice (+1 for each) versus the number of goals a team gives up when the same player is on the ice (-1 for each). If a player is +20, then he has been on the ice for 20 more goals for than against.

We could definitely do this for Lunacy. "Plus" is the amount of points a robot scores in a match. "Minus" is the amount of points scored in that robot's trailer. This stat would help you do apples to oranges comparisons (shooters vs. dumpers vs. pushers) to figure out who can score, who is good at avoiding being scored on, etc. With a little cleverness, you can even compute a normalized +/- that takes into account the opponents (a team who faces a lot of tough teams and emerges +5 has done better than a team that goes +15 against cupcakes).

All we would to do is assign a scout to each team in each round. Simply count the number of points scored by and on each team, and fill out a table. Divide the sum of each team's rounds by the number of rounds and you get a "+/- per round" stat that should paint a pretty clear picture about the robot's performance.

Is this stat perfect? Of course not. <G14> will affect the stat, to be sure. And teamwork is not fully acknowledged (e.g. I push this bot into the corner so you can dump into it, but I have scored no points myself). But I think it might be the best - if not simplest - representation (along with Win/Loss records) to score the robots of Lunacy.

How do the scouts of Chief Delphi feel about this? Is this something worth pursuing on a collaborative, cross-regional level?

-Jared

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

I like the idea...+/- in hockey is a VERY useful stat that tends to say a lot about the team play of an individual player.

Where this could get confusing in scouting is just the simple act of counting the balls that are being scored. Even with 1 person per robot/trailer, I could see numbers being miscounted. This doesn't mean this stat shouldn't be used (I'm sure most good scouting teams will do this exact thing, not all will call it "plus/minus") I think its just worth noting that the numbers you count for this may not be fully accurate on some occasions.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

i think you are right the only problem is summoning up the "man"power to do it i know my team could never get 6 people for every match, at every competeition.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

our scouting team will be taking into acount +/- for sure, i think the team effort (blocking in so partner can score) will be huge as well, and diversity in plan of attack will also be on the top of our lists

So basically you want Dennis Wideman for an alliance partner

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

You could probably do a reverse-OPR as well. Rather than basing the OPR matrix on the sum of your alliance's scores, do another run that uses your opponent's score. That would give you the average amount that your team contributed to your opponent's score. Subtract reverse-OPR from forward-OPR, and that could get you a mathematical estimation of your +/- score without having to sit in the stands for 3 days at every regional.

What is OPR? It's a lot like simply taking your team's average score and dividing by 3, but a bit more complex and accurate. Do a search for it, there's a couple decent explanations. It is good because it can ferret out teams that just got carried along by good partners and didn't actually contribute to their high scores (something that a simple average cannot detect).

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

The way I would envision it is that a scout would look only at the points scored BY a robot during the round. Counting the points in its trailer is probably easiest after the round, when the field reset crew is removing the game pieces.

And yes - there would be some margin of error. The hope is that it will be fairly slim compared to the amount of "good" information.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

How do you account for which robots scored which balls into which trailer? Thats going to be the essence of scouting this year.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

DURING the match you watch a robot to see how many balls it scores.

AFTER the match you can watch as the balls are removed to see how many points have been scored in its trailer.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

also, which Payload Specialists scored which balls in which trailer? I think we're going to see quite a variety in human scoring ability also.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

That would certainly need special consideration if this method is used.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

A very simplified and perhaps more accurate version of over/under (and closer to the NHL version) would be to simply take your team score and subtract your opponents score.

This would, of course, be subject to issues around teams scoring on themselves to prevent to large a win, but it would certainly still be valid considering how rare that will be.

In NHL, it's not your personal goals vs. how many is scored on you - it all goals scored while you're on the ice by your entire line... very similar to this situation.

So you only need to grab the final scores and the robots involved in each match to calculate it.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

Uhh...do you realize how hard that strategy will be to implement? Traking which balls go where and making sure that the ones are shot and picked up and delivered and robots blocked and blocking shots and...:eek: . That and there are a bunch more ways to do well in a competition rather than just scoring. What robots that you want on your team will entirely depend on the strategy that your team wants. So its a good idea...but needs some tweaking for each team.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

I think if you have this, you should also have another option or box that says this robot, instead of (or in addition to) shooting or dumping, plays defence, feeds to human player, helps with offensive maneuvers (trapping to help alliance score), and other things like that. If they feed to human player, how effective was their human player and how many balls did they feed them (scored 13/18 balls?). If they help with offensive maneuvers, how long did they hold, and was it long enough? Also, did they have penalties for this or that?

Just some ideas.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

Just for the sake of complete accuracy, in the NHL, the +/- is only affected when both teams are at full strength or the scoring team is shorthanded.
The shorthanded part fails a bit because the robots would still expect to score in a 2 v 3 game. I would suggest, if a robot didn't show up for a match, then the difference would not be counted.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

Want some more complication?

How about (as Tom Line suggests) teams that intentionally score in their own trailer (i.e. for their opponents) to avoid the dreaded 2x or 3x SUPER CELL withholding rule <G14>?

Would you ignore self-inflicted scores or count them as +'s??

Arrhhh...

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

As super cells count 7.5 times as much as moon rocks, scouting could be simplified by just reporting empty cells upgraded and super cells scored. Super cells will be match deciders when it comes to the elimination rounds.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find a better practicable method of grading the Lunacy bots. OPR-type methods may or may not be as useful this year. Personally, I like the +/- method myself.

Notice the last sentence. Robots of Lunacy is the operative term there. This method would seemingly take no measure of scoring done by humans players. In this year's game, the scoring/shooting capabilities of a team's HP may turn out to almost as important as those of the robot.

One possible way to account for this is to have the scouts track one trailer per person. Then, they could count the number of balls/points scored by each source. Putting the six sheets together should give plenty of data on which to base any metrics.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

I disagree. This year, there aren't even things like penalties, bonuses, multipliers, or autonomous to muck things up. Your score is simply how many balls are in your opponent's trailers, which means it should be fairly easy to calculate in an OPR-like style how many balls your team (on average) puts in your opponent's trailers. The best part is that you can (probably) run the opposite, so you can also find how many balls your team receives in its trailers and have that be a useful statistic to figure out which teams are better at avoiding getting scored on. Assuming that it does work both forwards and backwards, that means you can approximate +/- data this year, which you typically haven't been able to in the past.

Very little beats having people sit in stands tabulating data, but as a proxy (or addition) to scouting, OPR will be quite useful this year.

The stuff that really screws up OPR is exponential scoring or other non-linear scoring styles, because with exponential scoring, you end up with nearly meaningless results. Super cells might throw a small wrench into things, but I don't think they will, seeing as they are essentially equivalent to scoring 7.5 moon rocks.

Anyway, we'll see when the first set of scores comes out if an OPR ranking compares nicely with observed data.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

I ran through a list of the rules with penalties... there's quite a few. The good news? They shouldn't be called very often and they're mostly just 10-pointers. The bad news? They're still there.

This type of ranking system could be very interesting to implement/calculate.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

I think +/- is a great stat since it show how good a team is at scoring and avoiding be scored upon. It is very important to take HP into account because their impact could be significant. The problem comes in trying to find 12 scouts (1 for each robot and 1 for each HP) who will be able to consistently be able to show up to matches (especially for small teams). But this could be one of the best scouting methods because it separates it's own score from it's alliance score.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

Good thoughts, people, and keep it coming!

I agree that the human player is a huge factor this year, and that they need to be scouted as well. Unfortunately there is no way that I can think of to track everything going on without a large number of scouts per round. That said, I think that scoring will be much slower and more controlled in general than people think (I think a good robot this season will score maybe a dozen balls in a round).

As far as special cases go (penalties, miscounting, etc.), I wouldn't get too hung up on them. We acknowledge that statistics have inherent error, and that they only capture a small subset of the "game experience". While we're at it, what about robot failure? I've seen great teams throw a chain early in a match and sit idly by. It happens. This could destroy any sort of averaging stat (especially this year).

All statistics are necessarily incomplete for any nontrivial challenge. Not all RBIs are equal in baseball. Not all touchdowns are equal in the NFL. Not all goals are equal in hockey. But stats are easier to express colloquially. They are meant to supplement our understanding of team performance - NOT be the bottom line.

Re: The Plus-Minus stat in Lunacy
 

Wow, I just posted a +/- stat as a scouting basis in another thread, before I noticed this one.

Is +/- perfect? No, absolutely not? Is Blake Wheeler the best player in the NHL? Hell no! Is Alexander Ovechkin 2.4x better than Sidney Crosby? Yes, but that's a different story. :cool:

But the core idea is what actually matters here. Four stats should be tracked to get an ideal measurement (one of which can be done after the match by looking at scores), "team" +/-, "robot" +/-, alliance +/-, human player balls scored. Potentially you can even have a super cell +/- category for each of those if you wanted.
Additionally each of these stats should be tracked for the event and each individual match.

Robot +/- is how many balls the robot scored against how many are in it's trailer. Team +/- is the robot +/- with the human player balls scored (by their HP) added to the "+" column.
Alliance +/- for an individual match would simply be the score (before penalties, possibly removing super cells if you wished). For an event you may replace this with an "OPR/DPR" style calculation if you prefer.

The ideal tracking solution would be 12 scouts per match. One scout is tracking each robot to see how many balls it scores. At the end of the match they note how many balls were scored in the trailer. That scout also notes some basic traits of how the match was played (robot was pinned, played defensively, etc.).
One scout is also assigned to each human player to track how many balls they score (accuracy can also be noted if you wish). General notes here also apply (throwing into field vs. "feeding" robots).

Both the average +/- and the individual match +/- are going to be very important data. The average should (theoretically) give a fairly imbiased estimation of which robots are best against the field of competitors. The individual match one will show outliers. What happened in those outliers is quite possibly the most important data of all.
Find what went right and what went wrong (based on the quick notes taken) and you ca figure out which teams are reliable, what strategies work for/against them, and what types of robots they match up well against.
That data is going to be a quicker and less subjective method of estimating the abilities of teams.