[gblake]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

And let's stop calling the current schedule random. It is not. And one of the metrics it looks at is "number of times played with or against".

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

Additionally, one of the things the FTA/Scorekeeper looks at after generating a candidate schedule is the number of unique partners and opponents for each team. If one team has a wildly different number for one of those metrics, that is grounds to run the MatchMaker algorithm a second time.

After dabbling with creating a scheduler a few years ago (I still have the code), I believe that there is a huge unnecessary burden in the methods I *think* are still being used to create schedules for both FIRST and VEX tournaments.

Think about this.

It is possible to create and store, in advance of any tournament, for any/all possible numbers of participants, "canned" match schedules that satisfy any constraints desired, and that include N matches (where N is much larger than the number matches expected in any reasonable tournament).

The number of schedules to be created and the storage space they would consume are both more than zero, but both are trivial in modern computers.

On the day of a tournament:

If T teams are participating, the canned schedule designed for T teams is used.

The actual teams participating can be randomly assigned to the T placeholder teams used to generate that canned schedule (Real team X becomes team 1 in the canned schedule, real team Y, becomes team 2 in the canned schedule, etc.).

The actual match schedule to be used is then produced by picking a random starting point with the N sets of matches in the canned schedule, and simply using the next M sets of matches for the tournament.

Even a slow, modern computer could accomplish (or repeat) the day-of-the-tournament part of the process in a trivial amount of time.

Furthermore, I can't think of any reason not to publish the pre-computed, canned schedules.

If the canned schedules were published in advance, then, on the day of a tournament (or well before?), tournament organizers could publish that event's random real-to-placeholder team assignments, and the event's randomly chosen starting point within the N matches of the canned schedule being used.

Once that info (above) is published - voila! - scouts/anyone could easily produce a perfect copy of the entire event's schedule, without having to retype it, scan it, web scrape it, etc.

I believe that adopting this approach to creating match schedules would improve the FIRST/VEX/whatever experience.

Blake

PS: Also, just think how much fun people could have debating the "fairness" of pre-computed schedules (the entire thing, or selected stretches). If the practice was adopted, someone could start a thread on both evaluating that, and determining how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Many hours of popcorn-munching entertainment would follow.