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Unread 04-10-2011, 23:24
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Re: Match Scheduling Algorithm Competition

Quote:
Originally Posted by gyroscopeRaptor View Post
The latest post on Bill's Blog revealed some information about the purpose of the competition.
See the quoted text below.

I wonder if FIRST will ever become so tired of the complaining that they decide to test drive using well-known, precomputed schedules containing placeholder team IDs (before any/all tournament(s) folks can go over the well-known schedules with a fine toothed comb as many times as they like until they are groomed into perfect "fairness" ), and then simply replace the placeholders with actual teams IDs at the start of each/any tournament.

No one could complain that any perceived problems with the schedule(s) were the fault of a scheduling algorithm that treated any category of team better or worse than any other. The algorithm couldn't. It wouldn't have any information about the teams participating in any of the tournaments. It could be run in Dec 2011 and then retired permanently (after any nit-picking of its results was completed).

FIRST could even challenge (potential) complainers to massage the pre-computed schedules until they were so thoroughly "fair" that any conniving attempt to put weak or strong teams into special slots in the schedule would have no significant effect aside from one match (Yes - I know even one successfully gerrymandered match would be bad...).

Blake

Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake View Post
...
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" ...
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