First Big Thanks to the organizers for putting on a first class event and helping us all through the field difficulties without really missing a beat or any rounds.
Second Congratulations to all the winners, especially the Techno Ticks and the Champions (126, 1155, and 1902).
Special Thanks also to 181 and 716 (especially Andy for being the only adult on the field) great job out there, you almost got that second win!
More thanks go out to the strong backs from 1071 and 181 who helped pick up the field.
And finally a comment about the pairings: Any team that has been in this 3 years or longer is a legit veteran. The differences become what they have to work with as far as mentors, students and money. Those factors vary a little less for numbers 1-200 because the teams with marginal support are mostly gone now, but the level of support for the teams can vary a lot even among the "old" teams. And that level of support can vary a lot from year to year as students and mentors come and go.
Quote:
Originally Posted by artdutra04
The thing with "random" matches is that every now and then you get "super alliances" about just as often as you get "rookie alliances". FIRST tried doing an algorithm to "randomly" seed a team into each alliance based upon team number in 2007, but that plan met a lot of resistance from the FIRST community and was discontinued after that season.
FIRST matches aren't truely random. If they were, you might have to play back to back matches. Things like minimum match separation eliminate some of the randomness, and the more criteria you add into the algorithm, the less the results are actually random.
So yes, sometimes you are on the winning side of "lopsided" alliances, and sometimes you are on the losing side of "lopsided" alliances. But as more and more qualification matches are played out, the "average lopsided factor" will converge towards nearly even alliances. It's like flipping a coin a lot of times in a row. For a while, it may seem like it's landing a lot more often on heads than tails, but as you keep going it'll converge to 50/50.
|