Quote:
Originally Posted by Pat Fairbank
One thing that I noticed - not sure if it's a negative or not - is that the algorithm seems to optimize the number of other teams each team is paired with, possibly at the expense of optimizing the number of opponent teams. For example, at Waterloo, where each team played 11 qualification matches, each team had 22 different alliance partners (the maximum possible), while having a number of opponents ranging between 20 and 25. So no team was paired together with the same team twice, while having a repeated opponent anywhere between 8 and 13 times.
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That's because you need more opponents than partners. In fact with that small a pool, you HAD to have repeat opponents. With 11 matches you needed 22 unique partners and 33 unique opponents to not have a repeat. That is really hard to do with only 29 other robots. Under these circumstances it is understandable that virtually every match had at least one non-unique opponent.
Which would you rather have? Play eleven robots twice or two robots eleven times? Admittedly those are the extremes and the likely result is somewhere in between ie. 6 robots three times and 3 robots twice, but you get the idea...