[Nate Smith]

Being the scoring operator at Great Lakes this past weekend, and therefore the one telling the system to generate the matches, I am well aware of this problem. It stems from how the system attempts to maximize the time between matches for a given team(the algorithim used is meant specifically for this.) Unfortunately, this causes a less than perfect distribution, as many have already mentioned. I am currently working on a system which will be submitted to the proper people at FIRST(having worked extensively with the FIRST scoring systems the last few years, I know who these people are) for preliminary testing at the West Michigan Regional(if not sooner), which will do the following:

-ensure that no team has the same alliance partner more than once in 99% of situations(the strange "overlap match" between one set of matches and the next is the only exception).

-Attempt to allow at least 5 matches between 2 matches that any given team competes in(may be changed, the code is really ugly for this part)

For those of you who have seen my discription of the pairings code used for OCCRA this past year, this may all look vaguely familiar...that's because it's based off of the same code. Because of this, my repeat opponent checking logic still stands...there is none. My feeling is that unless both alliance members in the opposing alliance are the same(which is 99% impossible using my pairings code, due to the ally checking), you do not truly have a "repeated opponent" However, the system uses a random number generator, re-initialized at every launch, so if you don't like the # of repeated single team opponents, just run it again and get a different set of values. I'm actually working on final testing and FileMaker integration now, so we'll see what happens...

---UPDATE---
On the first trial run with FileMaker Integration, The statistics I got were as follows:

Max Times paired w/ same team: 1.0
Max Non Unique Allies: 0
Avg Non Unique Allies: 0
Count of Teams with 3 or more ally repeats:0

Max times opposing same team: 2
Max # Non Unique Opponents: 2.0
Avg # Non Unique Opponents: 0.7

Min # Between Matches: 6.0
Avg # Between Matches: 13.7
Max # Between Matches: 33.0

What do you think?