[cbolin]

Excellent feedback from everyone!! Reducing all of that scouting info to a clear statement of how to play that next match is pretty challenging. An then the drive team must be willing to accept it as Swampdude pointed out.

[my sea story]
At Palmetto, by the end of Friday competitions, we were doing poorly in the qualifying rounds even though we had these things going for us:

1). We spent about 6 hours the day before making 3 major mods on our bot that we learned from in Florida. This gave us a great bot.
2). We watched and filmed every match and recorded lots of scouting info similar to that suggested by previous posts.

We posed this question to our stategy and drive team that Friday night? Why were the top 5 robots ranked in the top 5 after only 6 or 7 matches? Our robot was now as good as these robots, but what was the difference?

The team (students) went to the hotel that night, watched several matches with the top 5 bots, watched our matches, bounced the results with all of our scouting data and came up with this significant strategy change.
1. We were to play in a specific (?) manner.
2. We were to reduce all scouting data to just two (?) variables.

The change in our game play was incredible. Finally, after two years, we were doing things right.

NOTE: We'll share the (?) as soon as Radioshack unlocks their vexrobotics.com website. ;-) (something like 8 d, 7 h, 34m, 29 s)

So, reducing collected data (tons of it) into something applicable to a 2-minute match seems to be the key element we were missing. We look forward to seeing a lot of you guys in Atlanta and finding out if our team's efforts will pay off. To the rest, we'll see you in 2006.

Good luck,
ChuckB