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Unread 31-03-2009, 16:04
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Tom Saxton Tom Saxton is offline
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Re: Is the qualification match robot randomizer really "random"

Quote:
Originally Posted by waialua359 View Post
My only complaint is that we went to NJ to meet many new teams. Why go through an entire weekend only to meet a few.
This happened though in '08 also for a few regionals. In Chesapeake '08, we saw the Robo Raiders (75) 4 matches in a row. 3 Against and 1 with them.
Given a finite amount of time to generate the schedule, no schedule will be perfect. In the Chesapeake '08 regional, 75 and 359 were the only pair of teams that saw each other 4 times, all other pairs occurred three or fewer times. Even those two teams saw a total of 30 (359) or 32 (75) different teams.

Last year's implementation did a poor job of guiding the scorekeepers in choosing the minimum gap between matches. In the case of Chesapeake '08, that parameter was set too high (8) thus the scheduling algorithm was overly constrained. Because of the constraint to give teams at least 8 matches between rounds, the order of teams could not change very much from one round to the next. This caused excessive duplication among pairings at several of the larger regionals in 2008, and was not brought to my attention until I was waiting in the Houston airport for a connecting flight to Ecuador which kept me out of the country until after Atlanta.

That problem was fixed for this year. For example, the Chesapeake '09 regional had a minimum gap between matches of 4, and the resulting schedule was much better, with just two pairs that appeared 3 times and all other teams never seeing another team more than twice.
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