[Dominick Ferone]

Originally Posted by jijiglobe

In my experience the bulk of "irrational" alliance selection decisions occur when teams don't really talk to their potential picks before alliance selections. I think one of the clearest examples I've seen of this was this year's New York City regional.

First of all, I believe that my team (694) was the strongest robot at the New York City regional, but we only managed to seed 8th given the fact that we spend almost two entire matches not moving. It's not irrational to not want to pick a team that had these kinds of issues, however, I was surprised by how few teams asked us what actually happened.

The second strongest robot at the regional almost definitely team 3419, who seeded third. Going into alliance selections, I personally think that the most rational picks for the first seed (team 375) would be first team 3419, knowing they would most likely reject, then to pick us, who would almost be forced to accept given our low seed.

The reason I think that this would be optimal is that that I predicted that team 375 would be either eliminated by us, or by team 3419 (I admit that some of this prediction was due to my own conceit).

The key is that all of this is only optimal given the fact that our dead matches were not for repeatable reasons, and even then, it's still very much arguable that this wouldn't be optimal, as we could have more issues in eliminations.

As it turns out, our two consecutive matches of non-action were due to

1. Forgetting to revert to competition code after pit testing
2. leaving our breaker switch loose

Both issues were fixed completely, and I think if team 375 had known this, they might have picked us. Instead, however, we were picked by the fourth alliance and went on to win the regional without a single loss in eliminations.

Disclaimer: I don't know that 375 didn't have this information, only that they didn't ask me for it, or ask anyone in the pit while I was there. In fact, we may have talked to members of their team about it, but it is sometimes difficult to find the right person to talk to when negotiating about alliance selections.

Basically, I think that a lot of teams fail to make "rational" decisions are acting perfectly rational based off of the information they had at the time.

I would like to build upon this with the NYC Regional.
By the end of the first day we won all but 2 matches, the first being us and another robot having technical problem.(which we found out was caused by a bad controller) The second match was something silly, besides the point. We went back to the hotel and examined out scouting data, and we looked over all the bots. The ones that were very similar we put in a maybe pile, while our biggest concerns were people who complimented us. We did lowbar and A defenses in under a second so we needed someone to take care of B and D.

Our top picks included 3419, 694 and 5016. We went up to 3419 with the intentions of creating one of the strongest alliances in our opinions, and they informed us they were watching us. Something that hurt our chances, was up until that point we were still trying to do vision tracking and not succeeding( 694 and 1796 were in the same boat). So we wanted to prove we could shoot high and relied on our vision, instead of mounting our flashlight like 694 had. So the scouting report shows we weren't very successful with high goals.

Once we saw 694 we had to pick them, and we were initially planning on grabbing a defense bot since we assumed 5016 would get grabbed. When we they were avaliable we changed our plan to full offensive attack. I know during alliance selections 694 was hesitant about this, but in the end it helped prevail.

That and that our scouting report had a feature that told us the most optimal defense to put against the opposing alliance based a grading of success.