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Unread 04-10-2011, 18:11
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AKA: Mark McGivern
FRC #3633 (Catalyst)
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Join Date: Dec 2010
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Re: Match Scheduling Algorithm Competition

The latest post on Bill's Blog revealed some information about the purpose of the competition.
Quote:
Dean had the opportunity to speak at the 2011 TopCoder Open and always looking for ways to promote and support FIRST, he accepted their offer to dedicate one of their competitions to a FIRST related issue. FRC currently uses a very effective algorithm written and generously donated by Idle Loop to generate match schedules at FRC competitions. However, some teams still complain to event officials if they believe they or any other team have been assigned to the same color alliance, the same player station, the same alliance partner, or to too many rookie teams, or against too many experienced teams, too many times. TopCoder offered a unique opportunity to explore the inclusion of variables not currently accounted for in the match generation algorithm. FRC requested the design include the ability to turn on and off various attributes and the ability to change the weights assigned to attributes when creating optimized schedules. FRC staff will review the winning algorithm, (and like last time, we will turn the algorithms over to teams for input if we decide we like it enough to seriously consider adopting it), but we are not under any obligation to utilize the winning design. My thanks to team 1251TechTigers who set up a booth at the event and answered questions from participants and attendees curious about FRC.
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