Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Ross
148 also always has a rookie partner. Not only that, but every team with a 2 or 3 digit number always plays with 2 other 4 digit numbers. There also isn't a single match with all 6 teams being 4 digit numbers, which should happen about 10% of the time.
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As I understood the explanation from the guy who designed the system, this is exactly what is supposed to happen. The alliances in a match are supposed to be closely matched in terms of total experience. So a ten year team is paired with maybe a two year team and a rookie. The average experience would then be around four years. They would wind up laying against either a similar alliance or maybe three three or four year teams. Further, the goal of the alogrithm is to have all of the matches have very similar "average ages".
This is an interesting idea and is similar to what AYSO and some other youth sports organizations do in assigning teams. They attempt to spread out the top ranked players so that the teams are close in ability.
I think the problem might be that the distribution of team ages is not uniform. There can be huge gaps that a dumb algorithm will not be able to account for. Another factor is that there is more room for adjustment when you are working with 13 or 14 individuals than when you only have three. Or they might be trying to work with too small a "window" for an acceptable match. There are a lot of ways for something like this to go wrong.