Quote:
Originally Posted by Molten
I'll completely admit that programming isn't my forte. With that said, please bear with my questions.
Would such an algorithm give the same schedule everytime? or would it vary greatly?
If we made it opensource, would I be able to use this knowledge to best guess my alliances for a given regional?
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Jason
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While I want to say that, in general, most programs will produce the same answer every time they are given the same initial conditions, there are enough exceptions to that rule-of-thumb to make it something you don't want to rely on.
However, generally, whether an algorithm that attempts to use random numbers can be used to get identical answers during separate uses is almost completely up to the programmer who writes the instructions the computer executes.
If the author gives users the ability to kick off an algoithm's (pseudo)random number generator with an initialization value the user controls, and if they weed out a few other sources of possible variation; then users can get repeatable results by using repeatable initial conditions, or they can get unpredicatable (far, far less predictable) results by choosing unpredicatable initial conditions.
Because these and other ways of randomizing the way the schedule is applied to the teams involved, the degree of predictabilty in each match can be placed completely into the hands of the algorithm's users. There is no need to worry that they will be forced into giving anyone any useful knowledge before they want to purposefully release it.
Blake
PS: This is true even if all 2012 FRC matches, for example, were played using a (a set of) fixed schedule(s) published online tomorrow. Knowing that Alliance AQB will face Alliance SRK in the first match of every FRC tournament does you no good
on the field if you don't know which of the teams in the tournament will get assigned to each of those letters (A, B, Q, S, R, and K) (that would happen the morning of the event).
But... knowing that AQB will face SRK would be a nice help for scouts. Once they (at the start of the day) matched up the real teams with the fake teams in the well-known "schedule", their scouting software, spreadsheets, etc. would know the complete actual schedule.
Entering the data necessary to correlate the fake and real team IDs means entering (by hand at the event) only a small fraction of the data necessary to describe the dozens of matches in a typical FRC/VRC/FTC tournament.
PPS: Of course, I realize that, pre-publishing a schedule filled with bogus place-holder team IDs, so that scout can simply/easily correlate its entries with the real teams at the start of a tournament, "isn't the way FRC works" ...