[AGPapa]

Originally Posted by Ed Law

None of these were errors. It was exactly how the program should have worked. Let me explain.

Since FIRST does not publish the alliance selection order, there were two ways to get this information. When Team 1114 first published their Scouting Database back in 2008, Karthik used to contact people from around the country who were at the other regionals and get the allaiance selection information from them. It was full of errors. Then he came up with the idea to have CD users post the information on CD and the first person to post it will get a Team 1114 T-shirt. When there is an error, others will point out and correct it. It is much better but there were still errors and you never know when it is correct and no more correction will be posted. This year CD users continue to do it but I still see people posting but not following the format and just list the teams in each alliance without paying attention to the order of Team Captain, 1st pick and 2nd pick.

I decided not to use data that is not 100% accurate. I wrote a program to automatically figure out who the alliance captains are and the other 1st and 2nd round picks. In the cases where it is definite, the program will call it out, e.g. # 3 pick. In other cases when there is no way to tell which team in an alliance was picked first or second, the program will list the higher ranked one as # 3 or 14 pick, and the lower ranked team as # 14 or 3 pick.

When FIRST publish the selection order, then I don't need to do this any more. You may notice that for Michigan events, all the teams have a definite selection order. This is because the FTA of all the events email me the Alliance Selection Report that the FMS can write out so I can do the rankings for all the teams under the Michigan point system. When other regional FTAs are willing to post that file in CD, then there will be no more guessing. We have tried to ask FIRST to publish this information but they don't think it is important.

Wow. That is pretty impressive. I didn't notice the different order for the "#3 or 14" and "#14 or 3". Thanks for the information.