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  #16   Spotlight this post!  
Unread 09-03-2003, 18:46
Wayne C.'s Avatar Unsung FIRST Hero
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hey- I think we did pretty good?
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this is nothing new...

This "non-randomness" has been a perennial problem with FIRST teams for years. The competition software apparently automatically generates the pairings. With small data sets the randomness goes away (10 rounds- 50 teams).

Of course doing it by hand is a nightmare. Believe me- I've done it using both techniques. Even worse is trying to keep any team from playing matches too close together.

Perhaps a good off season project is for someone to make the perfect system without assigning team numbers and present it to FIRST. Make a number of possibilities for 40-41-42 teams etc- so FIRST can use whatever system is applicable to the regional based on attendance.

Of course someone will always have a problem with it...

WC
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Unread 09-03-2003, 18:50
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Quote:
Originally posted by rees2001
it was actually 3 times & we had to play against them once. 2 out of our first 3 matches were against the same 2 teams. FIRST had better fix this fast or there will be alot of unhappy people. & BTW It was us that 461 was paired with for practice & we only played 1 team in the the top 10. The eventual #1 seed. We did beat them in one of the 2 times we played them.
It happened to us with 1000. A good team to be matched up with. A tough team to be matched up against.
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Unread 09-03-2003, 20:31
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St Louis is the first regional we have attended in the past four years where we had such non-random pairings. I know many other teams had similar pairings at STL.

In the past, either someone hand-paired or set the flags in the s/w differently. I'd be curious to find out why it worked in teh past but not this year, since this kind of program shouldn't change from year to year.

Part of the problem with non-random pairings is that you only get to interact with a small segment field. There are competitive issues as well. But they are not as major as the interaction issue.

There were other technical difficulties as well in STL, especially with the scoring program. I suspect that in the first weekend of regionals that all these bugs cropped up and there simply wasn't enough manpower to deal with everything.
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Unread 09-03-2003, 20:50
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It really depends. I was at the VCU regional, and some teams had problems with the psuedo-randomness of the match pairings, while others did not. Our team happened to be against team 401 twice, but that is all, and we didn't find anything wrong with that.

Also, this does come up every year. One of our mentors knows the guy who does the match pairings for a few of the regionals, and he explained it this way: they do the pairings the night before competition for security reasons (they don't want anything leaked), and that doesn't give them enough time to change anything drastically. Also, due to their system setup, it is impossible to individually switch teams by hand (and even if they did, the issue of just how many repeats are allowed, and who to switch with comes up).

Overall, it's an imperfect system. Any system will be. The people behind it are a bunch of die-hard FIRST volunteers, who are doing their best to create a fun playing enviornment. If you do have problems with match pairings, I only ask you to bring it up in a polite way, and don't expect them to change things this year.

Good luck at all your regionals everybody!
Stephen
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Unread 09-03-2003, 22:08
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we also had similar pairings, we were on the field with a team 4 times,another 3 times and others twice. it wasnt that big of a deal to us, yes it did hurt our rank though, but i really would have liked to be able to play with and against a wider variety of robots.
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Unread 09-03-2003, 22:20
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Ok folks, here is the deal.

If we put a lottery machine next to the field and generate matches that way, you will probably get the exact same thing, and the only good side is there will be less complain to us about pairing not being random. The bad side is, the lottery machine will probably make it even worse.

We tried the best we can to generate match list. On Thursday night, I set at the scoring computer for about an hour, generating match lists after match lists, using most of the 11 methods included with the scoring methods, and the best we could get is have two team who will get paired with at least 1 same partner for 7 times.

Now, it could be that Sacramento is a small regional of 27, and a lot of teams are bound to face each other again, but still, that's just the way it is. I had to maneually swap some teams, and it worked out fine. Teams were fairly happy about the matches (if not, you can complain to me, and I will apologize for it).

The thing is, FIRST tried the best they can to make the match generator. There are 11 methods of generating "random" matches, and the score keeper work for a long time to keep trying and trying to make it good. But the fact of the matter is, we work all day from 7am to 5pm to get the matches working, and more than 2 addition hour beyond that schedule is simply unresonable. I even heard St. Louis score keeper had to stay until 3am in the morning to get it working. We just can't check the list number by number after working more than 10 hours straight.


But don't get me wrong, I understand the frustration for teams as well. I've been on a team myself. It's just that given the limited resources and time, this is the best we can do so far. The list is as random as it will get, it's just that the numbers don't look that way.

If you want to create your own match generator, feel free to do it, but don't even bother submitting it to FIRST unless you have done more than 1000 trails, and all of them looks "random" and makes you happy. But then again, that's not really random itself. Being "random" means some of the time it's not going to look random.
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Unread 09-03-2003, 22:44
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not too bad...

As a participant of the Sacramento regional i would say that the matches were well done and the pairings were fairly random. We played against one team 3 times and that was it. My only complaint was that there was very little time between some of the matches (less than 3 rounds). But with 18 total matches in 2 days one cant really expect to have a long break. I Think that first is did a fine job witht he Sac regional.
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Unread 09-03-2003, 23:05
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Team #538 also found their "random" pairings to be highly questionable. We had 4 matches with 906, were partnered twice with 1208 and 1005, and faced many other repetitions that I can't remember. While I was complaining about this in the pit, a mentor from #525 leaned his head over the wall saying that they faced the same problem.

We went to the Kennedy Space Center (FL) regional for the past two years and never faced this kind of craziness before. Maybe we just got (un?)lucky.
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Unread 09-03-2003, 23:30
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I was at the VCU regional and we had 2 identical matches. We also saw some teams several times. The most concerning unchanging thing for us was our placement on the playing field. We were always placed in position C1 or D1. That means we were always starting with our robot to our left and always entering the playing field onto the red carpet. We noticed in practice that different carpet gave us different results in autonomous mode. It was unnerving having to have our first test of autonomous mode from a new position occur during the finals.

...On the other hand, I was extremely happy to have had a chance to be in the finals. Thanks for picking us Synergy! If any of the rest of you get a chance to be allies with team 975, congratulations! Those guys are truely professional teammates!

Eric
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Unread 10-03-2003, 00:27
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Quote:
Originally posted by Eric G
I was at the VCU regional and we had 2 identical matches. We also saw some teams several times. The most concerning unchanging thing for us was our placement on the playing field. We were always placed in position C1 or D1.
Yup, our first and last practice matches, we were up against 343, then the next day our first qualifying match was exactly set up the same as our first practice match. We later faced the same alliance as before with 343.

We did face 122 twice, but that seemed normal since the other two teams were different.

And yes, we stayed red the whole time. Now this is nice for not having to change lights, but this cuts down who you could possibly be paired with and paired against in half. I'd loved to have been paired with 343 for once instead of facing them for 2 practice matches and 2 qualifying matches....
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Unread 10-03-2003, 03:01
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Its effect on qualifying rounds...

As previously stated, it seems the St Louis regional didn't use a very random randomizing system. We either played with or against team 755 in 5 of our 8 matches. There were also several other teams we played with repeatedly.

The lack of randomization can perhaps be unfair and limiting to teams in qualifying rounds. Some teams are not always capable of creating high scores, thus often leading to one-sided, low-scoring games (leaving relatively low QPs).
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Unread 10-03-2003, 11:20
Greg Young Greg Young is offline
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At VCU we had two pairs of identical matches:

Match 11
Blue 510 1054
Red 977 587

Match 65
Blue 510 1054
Red 977 587

Match 24
Blue 611 405
Red 339 587

Match 78
Blue 611 405
Red 339 587

I understand that 339 had three of these pairs.

I can't complain, because the matches with 977 were very good scores that helped get us a 6th seed. We later chose 977 and 448 for an alliance that got us into the finals. I'm sure that some teams were not as lucky in their duplicate match partners.

The match pairings can't be completely random, but I think that exact duplicate matches should be avoided if at all possible.

Teams 977 and 448: Thank you. You guys are awesome.

Teams 384, 388, and 395: You guys are a little too awesome. Good luck at Championships.
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Unread 10-03-2003, 11:39
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I have actually spent a fair amount of time working on this very problem. There are tremendous improvements that FIRST could make to their existing system, but my guess is they don't have the resources. Check out this thread for some more detailed discussion on this subject.

Basically we aren't the first ones to come across this problem. Check out this link for some work that has been done for bridge tournaments. Maybe FIRST could hire this guy to adapt his program for use in FIRST?

FIRST could do MUCH better if had the resources to put on this issue.
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Unread 10-03-2003, 21:34
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It was said earlier that first could not change the configurations because their system wouldn't allow it. Did anyone look at the schedule and get the impression that it was just an MS Access report??

Eric
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Unread 10-03-2003, 23:00
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Well...considering that they don't use MS Access anymore, I don't think it's an MS Access report

It has been redone this year using filemaker.
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