Quote:
Originally Posted by artdutra04
At 35 teams, Pittsburgh Regional is a small regional, and the new randomizing algorithm needs a certain number of teams to be effective. With a large regional, you have a much larger pool of teams to randomly draw from for generating the match schedules than a small regional, which is why Pittsburgh has many similar alliances.
Small number of teams at a regional = small pool of potential teams to compete in any match.
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AD4 - I think it is worth noticing that with 36 teams in a regional, and with no other constraints other than minimizing repeat allies
and opponents, it is possible for a team to play a full 7 matches without ever seeing a repeat among the other 5 robots on the field.
In a 36 team Regional one should expect to have to hustle between matches because there are fewer teams that need to go out on the field before your own team is "up" again; but there is no reason to expect to see lots of repeat allies and opponents just because "only" 36 teams are present.
When you choose to maximize the smallest time between each team's matches, that starts to make things hard. When you allow teams to see other teams twice on the field, so long as that other team is an ally once and an opponent the other time; your ability to schedule matches starts to improve,,,
Bottom line: A small population of teams is not a reason to say that alliances will repeat or nearly repeat often. On the other hand, using a method that forms alliances from small medium and large team numbers does throw a pretty large wrench (i.e. constraint) into things....
Blake
PS: Once a match scheduling algorithm (suggested in this forum or elsewhere) that doesn't depend on team number is implemented; it is a trivial exercise to run it once for each possible number of teams from 1 to 100. After those results are reviewed and found correct, at each/any regional, the organizers just randomly assign the participating teams to fill the slots in the appropriate pre-generated schedule. Done.... No one will know who their opponents and allies are until the results of the random assignments are announced. Everyone will know the patterns in the match schedule beforehand; but who cares? The "worst" that could happen is that they detect a flaw in the algorithm ahead of time....