[JamesJones]

Now that the ratings are coming together very nicely. Could they be used by FIRST to influence the pairings during seeding and division groupings during the competition? I know past performance may not be indicative of future results but does anyone think 111, 47 or 16 are going to put out a crummy bot next year? We played some robots 2 and 3 times at KSC. Can you imagine how skewed the seeding results would be if some team got stuck playing Bomb Squad 3 out of 9 matches? If we have a past robot performance metric, then the sum of that metric for one alliance pair should be approximately equal to sum of their opponents in a given match. That way, if you are a medium performing robot and the computer randomly pairs you with wildstang in one match, they should have your alliance oppose an alliance with a medium performing robot and say 47. This way seeding would be much more performance based and not as much the luck of the draw. (BTW, I'm not saying all the high seeds didn't perform well but you have to agree that for many teams there is a lot of luck involved).

This could also be used to even up the competitiveness of division. The summation of the FirstStar ratings in each division should be the same.

The only problem with this is your team gets labelled and may get stuck competing in a certain class for which you may not be suited that particular year. In other words, if you had stellar performance in the past but turned out a bad bot one year you would be competing with all the other bots that had a history of stellar performance. In other words you would get creamed. On the other hand if you had a rather poor history but turned out a great bot one year you would rise to the top like a rocket!

Hmmmmmmm.

James Jones
Engineer/Coach
Team 180 SPAM