Quote:
Originally Posted by Knippschild
The FMS (the event management software) uses a very complicated algorithm to generate a completely RANDOM schedule. When FMS calculates who should be paired with whom, and who should be pitted against whom, it has no knowledge of the team's "big name"ship nor of that team's standings at other regionals.
The match parings take about 3-5 minutes to generate. Last year's algorithm only took seconds to generate... this one is definitely a lot more random by definition.
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As previously noted, the match pairings are anything but random. Rather, it is a highly constrained process, with many factors influencing how the pairings are established. As outlined in Section 9.3.2 of The Manual, there is a specific set of criteria that are used by the match pairing algorithm to generate the match list. The match pairings generated by the algorithm are evaluated for a "best fit" against these criteria as the list is generated, and adjusted mid-process if necessary. So, by definition, the resulting list is NOT random. Nor would you ever want it to be random. A truly random list will have a significant probability of having teams playing back-to-back matches, being allied with or opposing the same teams, or having uneven numbers of matches. All of these are situations that we clearly want to avoid.
-dave