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Unread 26-04-2007, 08:47
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AKA: Robert
FRC #1177 (Mecha-Jags)
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Re: [FVC]: Longer competitions

Funny you should mention that particular method for conducting interviews during matches. We considered this early on in the planning of our tournament and came to the same conclusion. That it is a good idea but....

Interleaving the interviews with the matches did not seem like a good option for us because the scoring software generates the match schedule which may conflict with the interview schedule. We generated the interview schedule a couple of days in advance and e-mailed it to teams so they would have advanced notice of when they should be ready. We purposefully pushed some teams toward the end of the interview time period because some were traveling from out of State that morning. There was also the issue of no-show teams to the competition. When that happened and it did at 2 of the 3 state tournaments I attended, a new match schedule had to be generated which again threw off the time slots for teams to compete.

This issue of teams meeting each other multiple times during the matches is one that I saw repeatedly at all the events I attended. This is a "must have" needed improvement on the software. If we could have figured out a way to manually schedule the matches ourselves and then work the interviews around them (or vice versa) we would have been ahead of the game.

Hey.... what do you know!

Did we just come up with another suggested improvement on the scoring software? To be able to manually schedule teams into certain matches in order to facilitate the interviews or at least avoid the same teams matching up repeatedly.


Quote:
Originally Posted by ManicMechanic View Post
One way to make room for more matches is to interleave the interviews with matches. I've attached a spreadsheet that shows how a tournament of 24 teams (one field), 6 matches can be run with interviews conducted simultaneously with the first 2 matches. I'm sorry to say that it makes interviews even more stressful, but it does shorten the day. Perhaps some interviews could be spread into Round 3.

One feature of the match set-up is that any given team sees no repeat alliance partners and no repeat opponents (to my knowledge) across matches. This is one improvement that I feel would help the match-ups to be more even, lessening the need for more matches, as our team faced the same opponent 3 times at regionals and the same opponent twice in Atlanta.

The algorithm used to satisfy this condition is based on modular arithmetic. Basically, Round 1 moves from one slot number to the next in increments of 1, Round 2 uses increments of 2, Round 3 uses increments of 4, then inc 5, inc 7, and inc 11. If you have more or less than 24 teams, you can still increment by these values but lengthen or shorten the team list. If you have a number of teams close to a multiple of 24, (48, 72, 96), just change "n" from 1 to 25, 49, or 95 and repeat the blocks. Also, to shorten the day, one or 2 matches could be eliminated.
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