[Jack]

Actually, it really is not as easy to pare up the matches as you think. While i don't know how first does it, I talked with the person that made matches for a local robotics competition, and it's pretty hard to make them.

If you logically think about it, it's very hard to make a match list.

First: Are you going to assign matches to teams, or teams to matches. (IE: Are you going to loop through the team list and assign teams to matches, or are you going to loop through the empty match list and pull teams to fill that match)

Second: Now you have to insure that teams aren't going to play all back to back, but rather spread out though all the matches. (IE: For team fill: Pick match # between 1-10. Pick match # between 11-20 (and make sure that if the match is 11, that the last one wasn't 10). For match fill: Go through the first 10 matches, and pull numbers only once from a team list. Make sure that none of the teams that were in match 10 play in match 11)

Third: Attempt to prevent teams from playing with another team more than once. (IE: Have different alliance partners each time)

Forth: Make sure that the script doesn't time-out or not find a solution that passes all requirements.


As you can see... it's not as easy as you may think from a programming viewpoint as you may think.

<sort of off topic>Making lists like this really is quite hard. (Even to programmers, I first looked at making match lists and thought "This isn't hard", but once you get down to doing it... it's a pain in the butt. I've thought about it a few times, but really don't even want to know how something as large as my high school makes the class schedules. - There are sooo many constraints</>