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Originally Posted by Richard
So what?
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A few thoughts off the top of my head:
1) I don’t think that FIRST segregating team by purposely pooling low, medium and high teams is a good thing. By FIRST segregating teams into “pools” they are inherently saying that one group is different than the other. Whether they are “better” or “worse” or otherwise “special” I can only speculate but as a society I thought we learned somewhere back in the 60’s that segregating groups of people is never a good idea.
2) In a regional with a lot rookie teams (more than 1/3 of the teams in this case), many of the rookies don’t yet understand the importance of good scouting and tend to pick the next highest ranked team whether or not that team will be the best alliance partner for them or not.
3) With the current non-random scheduling algorithm rookies are artificially pushed up the rankings.
4) My contention is that is doesn’t make nearly as much of a difference to low number teams with a good arm design as it does to low number teams with a good ramp/lift design. Dave told everyone at Bayou that the GDC wants teams to learn how to work together. They intentionally made the lift part of the game this year to challenge us to think about all the different types of robots that we will compete with and against. They intentionally wanted us to “get in the heads” of the other teams that we have never met. We actually did this. We sat down and thought about how we could make our robot as compatible with as many different unknown robot designs as possible. Then we proceeded to do the best we could to accommodate these designs. Our robot has and effective arm to place ringers and dual lifts that are spring loaded and are actuated by our alliance partner going up the ramp and into position and then are released by the alliance partners robot. Thus we are using part of the energy in our alliance partner to make the actual lift. While it was not compatible with all robot drivetrains we looked at the list of teams that would be competing at our regional and assumed that we would be randomly partnered with veteran teams at least as often as rookie teams. This was a false assumption. Had the rules given to us at kickoff stated “veteran teams will always be paired with rookie teams” I would have read between the lines that the chances of all the rookie teams having solid reliable drivetrains capable of climbing any sort of incline is much lower than veteran teams with established drivetrains. Also, I would have figured in the likelihood that the rookie drivers (with or without as solid, reliable drivetrain) probably didn't have as much driver practice as the veteran drivers who more than likely had a robot from a previous season to train their drivers on. Factoring these in we would have determined that ramps would not be as effective with rookie partners as they would be with veteran partners thus we would have focused more of our resources on a more effective arm and less on our ramps. As it stands we abandoned our usual strategy of do one thing and do it well and tried to do both this year. Unfortunately, this was not the year to change our usual strategy. That was our fault, however, if we had known then what we know now about the scheduling algorithm we would not have made that decision. I guess what I am saying is if you are an arm bot and you show up to a match with out any alliance partners or neither of your alliance partners can even move then at least you are capable of scoring ringer points on your own. You may or may not win but at least you can play the game. If you are in the same situation but are a ramp/lift bot at best you can play defense but you can’t actually score any points unless you have alliance partners. FIRST wants us to play the partner game but then they fix the matches so the chances are much higher that we won’t have any partners to play with.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Richard
Students of statistics will appreciate that "randomness" in assigning qualifying match alliance partners and opponents is not a realistic goal. There is simply not enough time available.
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Why? There were 37 teams at Bayou. We played 12 qualifying matches. That is 3 teams per alliance x 12 matches = 36 teams. Why couldn’t we each play with AND against each team but one?
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Originally Posted by burkechrs1
My thoughts about the alliance picking algorithm... IT"S NEVER GOING TO BE PERFECT! There simply aren't enough matches in a regional for one team to play every team they want. A basically what people are saying are they don't want to play with rookie teams and only want to play with veteran teams. Well not everyone is going to get what they want. Is it fair? No. But it's a randomizer for a reason. I think one reason it is a randomizer is so there isn't an obvious bias. Of course your going to get the near geniuses that will find some bias in there but why anazlyze the randomizer software. FIRST worked on fixing it from week 1. They did, what more do you want?
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I believe you must not have actually looked at my attached spreadsheet or you would see that the “randomizer” in question is, in fact, in no way random. This is the sum of the issue.
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Originally Posted by burkechrs1
Exactly what did you pay for? I keep hearing "not what we payed for," but what exactly is it that you didn't get that you payed for. You got a kit, you got a regional that there is no way you can admit wasn't fun, and you got an experience you'll remember forever. Seriously what more could you ask. If you think you got ripped off because you didnt get chosen for an alliance for the finals, i'm sorry to say and I don't mean to sound rude but a huge portion of that has absolutely nothing to do with your record! Good record or bad record it all comes down to how you perfrom as a robot.
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We all paid for the same opportunity to play with and against the same teams not a subset. Yes it does come down to how you perform, unfortunately, in a game where partners are important your performance is directly effected by your partners.