Quote:
Originally Posted by Navid Shafa
Any reason for 24th in specific, or are you just trying to point out the variation in the data? I think this might be a tiny bit misleading, because this number is likely to be higher at events with more registered teams.
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Knowing Eric, the logic is simple - by looking at the 24th best team, you are looking at the performance of the worst team to make it into finals, if alliance selections were to perfectly follow robot performance/abilities.
It is a way of seeing how deep the field is of competitive robots - if the 24th best robot is pretty good, then there will be a sufficient number of good teams to fill all the alliances, and the last few picks may still be pretty good robots - if the 24th best is pretty poor compared to the average, then not all alliances will get a good 3rd pick, which may shift the advantage to lower alliances which get 3rd pick earlier in the selection. Of course this ignores factors like robot specific abilities, and forming alliances off complimentary characteristics - but its a simple way, given limited information, to try and see how good the last picked robots are.
It is true that the 24th best would likely be better at events with more teams, but part of the intent with districts is to make sure all the events have the same (or very similar) number of teams - if one event is significantly smaller than the others, then those teams have an unfair advantage in the point system - they are more likely to rank high, win awards, and end up on alliances than at an otherwise equal larger district event - this is the primary driver for offering a 3rd play, to make sure all the events fill up and the odds are similar. This year there is a slight advantage for teams attending Mt. Vernon, or Oregon State University (as a 1st or 2nd event), otherwise the team count is pretty close across PNW district events
For reference, here's the current team count along with Eric's data:
31 (0.227,0.385,Eastern Washington University)
35 (0.333,0.398,Central Washington University)
29 (0.333,0.429,Oregon State University)
32 (0.333,0.434,Auburn Mountainview)
28 (0.333,0.463,Mt. Vernon)
33 (0.347,0.441,Shorewood)
32 (0.375,0.453,Glacier Peak)
35 (0.416,0.476,Auburn)
32 (0.444,0.498,Wilsonville)
35 (0.450,0.496,Oregon City)