Quote:
Originally Posted by platypus
As a former scouting lead and general strategy guru, I can speak to this.
In my experience, objective evidence is king. Subjective information, regardless of the source, is riddled with issues. My reasons for avoiding subjective information:
1. Scouts form biases early and often. The number of times I've looked over the objective data and realized that my thoughts or someone else's are inconsistent with the data is astounding, and it's often due to the fact that a scout will see a team do well early and then over-credit that team for later alliance successes. The same concept works in the reverse (over-crediting teams that strike scouts as bad with later alliance failures), but to a lesser extent.
2. Opinions differ scout to scout. Everyone is rubbed differently by what they see in a robot. Period. Anything that is debatable as to whether the robot in question is at fault or another robot will have multiple opinions. Whose opinion do you trust? Any of them? None of them? What makes one scout more trustworthy than another? How do you determine any that objectively? See my point?
3. Some scouts are smarter/more experienced than others. Hence, point #2. Good luck determining how much intelligence/experience helps an individual scout - it differs from person to person.
Ultimately, subjective scouting often gives you more issues than helpful feedback. Sometimes you'll get lucky with it, but most of the time, these issues will bias your data and taint your results. Don't risk it.
Thus, I reiterate what has been said in favor of objective scouting. Go by the numbers. Crunch them in excel Friday night. If you can, set up a software database to do it for you, but if your team lacks the resources to put all of its scouts on laptops (very few teams can), then take the data on paper and enter it into the database on one laptop.
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i have been doing scouting at events for 6 years, and now that im in college we still use the paper, picture, general pit scouting method. Especially now its a matter of molding the students to what you want to get out of them. For example, i try to sit with them all day thursday (if time permits) and will do an active commentary about the match that's going on. So we were watching matches in AZ and right away saw that 1726 was an excellent hurdler, and then we went into a quick description of how they hurdled. Now even though they were throwing balls on thursday that did not mean they could/would on fri/sat, but you know they are a team to watch out for. And sure enough, they were one of the best teams in AZ. We had another college mentor that was injured and he was just inputting match data into an excel sheet, honestly that sheet was useless with out a description. When you encourage descriptions you will mostlikely get their honest opinion about a robot as well, since the comments usually have to be short and to the point, "amazing or Terrible" you should be able to get a feel for the team by watching matches.
To me it would be like going to buy a car and only asking if it runs and what features it has, with out actually driving it and seeing for your self what work it may need, and if it actually does what the owner says it can do (aka pit scouting) It's all about conveying to the scouts how you want the data
In 2004 as a member of MORT (founding member of their now stellar scouting team), sitting in the stands for every match and being in a position to pick we were able to find robots that were amazing for us. 281 and 122, 281 i don't remember exactly what they werwe ranked, but they did well at palmetto, but our sleeper team was 122 Nasa Knights. This machine was truly amazing and was able to do it all, we were able to see that despite their poor performance in the quals, we knew they were a strong 3rd partner. If we had shown our team rep just the "raw data" there is NO WAY we would have picked them, that data does not show potential of teams, and i think you miss out on what could be the missing peice to you championship winning alliance.