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Posted by P.J. Baker, Engineer on team #177, Bobcat Robotics, from South Windsor High School and International Fuel Cells.

Posted on 5/7/99 2:21 PM MST


In Reply to: Bottom Line? posted by Dodd Stacy on 5/7/99 8:54 AM MST:



Dodd,

You have made several posts over the last couple of weeks that were right on the money. Very clear, and very intelligent. This one is no different. I've put together some info to help answer at least your 1st question, and made my 'Bottom Line' suggestion for the format of the National Tournament.

P.J.


Since I collected a lot of the info before nationals, I did a little more work and came up with these (unofficial) stats for the top 16 seeds at EPCOT:

15 of the 16 appeared in the elimination round of at least 1 regional

10 of the 16 were among the top 8 seeds in at least 1 regional

7 of the 16 appeared in the elimination round of at least two regionals

4 of the 16 were among the top 8 seeds in 2 regionals

2 of the 16 appeared in the elimination round of three regionals

With one possible exception of 1 team (I won’t name them, but invite them to comment), these were not 'lucky' teams - unless they were very lucky teams. Although I have made several statements concerning how to improve (read: reduce bad luck in) the seeding process at the national tournament, I must stick to my original statement about the seeding tournament this year: IT WORKED PRETTY WELL.

Now, as far as the good teams that were not drafted are concerned, what can we do for them? I think that one less seeding round in exchange for more elimination rounds, I could live with that, as long as a team’s average score from regional play was some how used in determining seeding at Nationals (this is well covered in many posts in this thread). What I could not live with, is having to come up with a list of nearly 100 possible alliance partners if I seeded 32nd in the seeding rounds. This could be fixed by breaking the National seeding tournament up into four groups with the top 8 from each group picking two partners from their group (or, to make things fun, make group 1 pick from group 4, 2 from 3, etc.). This would make the draft much more manageable for the teams doing the picking, while allowing more teams into the elimination tournament.

This is as far as I’m going to go in terms of trying to redesign the National tournament. I think that this format could work very well. IT IS NOT FAIR! The only 'fair' tournament would be some sort of hyper accurate computer simulation, and even then there would be complaints. I think the tournament format that I propose here (which is about 2% mine and 98% stolen from other posts), would put just about all of the top 50 teams (the 'real' top 50, not the top 50 seeds) in the elimination tournament. I think that we would be hard pressed to do anything better than that