Quote:
Originally Posted by Abhishek R
To use an extreme example, if the goal is to be more inclusive, then why, during the official season, don't the top teams at a regional pick some rookies or teams that haven't been to eliminations before, in order to give them the learning experience and excitement of being in the knockout stages? The answer is simple; everyone is trying to compete and if the captain believes that team will not give the alliance the best possible shot of winning the event, they won't be picked.
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Emphasis mine. I was intruiged by your assumption that eliminations experience leads to learning, so I did some digging. I looked at a number of second bots that 254 has worked with over the past few years and looked at the eliminations histories of these teams. Though I didn't crunch numbers (in part due to a lack of a metric to compare elimination records), it seems that teams who played with us as a second bot
did not seem to have an effect on their elimination records at other events: teams that won in the past kept on winning, teams that never went far into elims stayed that way (heck, one team hasn't seen eliminations since playing with us
).
But a few disclaimers:
- Learning could take multiple forms, but the easiest way to try and measure that is eliminations records.
- I looked at the second bots from regionals/offseasons for my dataset, because I knew that they generally have less eliminations experience than us or our partner. I also picked the teams 254 played with because I had experience with the teams (which may have opened the door to bias).
- I wasn't really sure how to measure elimination histories of teams, but the basic metric I used was to count how many times they made it to the semifinals or later each year. This metric is less than ideal, because it weighs wins and semis appearances equally. A fairer metric would be to do something like districts.
- I did this counting by hand, so it is not very precise. If I were to do this again with greater rigor (which I may well do if I have time), I would probably look at Michigan for cleaner metrics/data.
Tl;dr- Playing in elims once with really good teams doesn't seem to have an effect on future performance, though a more rigorous analysis is needed.