Any information about a match schedule?

[Andrew1261]

Does anyone know when the match schedules are going to be released? I've heard reports of Wednesday/ Thursday but was curious if anyone had extra details.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Andrew1261

Does anyone know when the match schedules are going to be released? I've heard reports of Wednesday/ Thursday but was curious if anyone had extra details.

This was asked last week. So, I'm going to go into the process again. It takes a bit to release the schedule.

1) Fields get set up. The scheduling software is part of the field.
2) Teams register.
3) Practice schedules are generated and played through.
4) Qualification schedules are generated.

Now, 1) should be somewhere in progress if not complete. 2) is tomorrow night. That means that the practice schedule would come out late Wednesday night or be on the tables Thursday morning. Qual schedules would be released Thursday morning, most likely.

In other words, patience. They'll get them out there. And you can bet that someone will notice that and put a link on CD when they do.

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by EricH

...The scheduling software is part of the field..

1) It doesn't seem like separating this software would be hard, and it would give us more freedom. So why not?
2)Since the schedule doesn't balance anything specific to teams competing, why can't we create a rainbow table of sorts with the optimal couple of schedules for each number of teams and then randomly assign teams to slots? No need to recompute the same thing over and over.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by lemiant

1) It doesn't seem like separating this software would be hard, and it would give us more freedom. So why not?
2)Since the schedule doesn't balance anything specific to teams competing, why can't we create a rainbow table of sorts with the optimal couple of schedules for each number of teams and then randomly assign teams to slots? No need to recompute the same thing over and over.

1) Although the Idle Loop Matchmaker software is part of FMS, there is also a facility to import a "hand" or "offline" generated schedule, as long as it is in the right format. Personally, I like that the match generation is done within FMS...it completely eliminates the (albeit improbable) event that someone messes with a schedule by hand to ensure that certain teams get favorable/difficult schedules.

2) In principle, this works. However, think of every combination of <N1 = Number of Teams> x <N2 = Desired Matches Per Team>. Depending on the event (district, regional, division), N1 could be anywhere between 24 and 100+. N2 could be anywhere between 8 and 13. Add in that different events (for various reasons) may also want different schedule parameters (to trade off "randomness" against repeat opponents, min/mean/max time between each team's matches, etc.) and you would need a pretty large high-dimensional table to store all of the possibilities.

You would probably be interested in reading this page that describes the scheduling algorithm.

[lemiant]

Originally Posted by Jared341

2) In principle, this works. However, think of every combination of <N1 = Number of Teams> x <N2 = Desired Matches Per Team>. Depending on the event (district, regional, division), N1 could be anywhere between 24 and 100+. N2 could be anywhere between 8 and 13. Add in that different events (for various reasons) may also want different schedule parameters (to trade off "randomness" against repeat opponents, min/mean/max time between each team's matches, etc.) and you would need a pretty large high-dimensional table to store all of the possibilities.

I wasn't aware that events were allowed to play with the parameters of the schedule, that changes things. However assuming FIRST were to standardize the parameters then the size of the table is at most 100 (24-123) x 6 (8-13) = 600 schedules. Each schedule is at most 267 matches (123 x 13 / 6), each of which has 6 bytes of information for a total of 1.6Kb of data. Add formatting and metadata and we're still not above 10kb... For every possible schedule! That would be incredibly easy to transfer and traverse. And it would allow us to put more processing power into determining the optimal schedule for each possibility.

[XaulZan11]

Wasn't the schedule released Wednesday night last year? I remember going through our matches in the hotel lobby.

[ChrisH]

My point was that the TEAMS have to be checked in etc. before the schedule can be generated. If a schedule was generated and a team should happen not to show up, then a new schedule would have to be generated. Any existing copies of the old schedule would need to be destroyed. This would have to happen no matter how the schedule is determined.

Having been through this sort of thing I can tell you it causes all kinds of problems. It is bad enough if the schedule has not been released, just grab the old schedules and toss them in a secure place. So you just wasted alot of paper. If incorrect schedules get out you have teams showing up for the wrong matches, unhappy spectators who miss their team's match, Cueing can get screwed up (if somehow they get the wrong version). It just gets ugly. Been there, done that.

All the division schedules are released at the same time so one division does not have an advantage. So until every team has checked in or it has been determined that they will not be showing up, no schedule.

Originally Posted by lemiant

1) It doesn't seem like separating this software would be hard, and it would give us more freedom. So why not?
2)Since the schedule doesn't balance anything specific to teams competing, why can't we create a rainbow table of sorts with the optimal couple of schedules for each number of teams and then randomly assign teams to slots? No need to recompute the same thing over and over.

[LucasM]

But they are handing out paper schedules in the pit.

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by LucasM

But they are handing out paper schedules in the pit.

Yeah, this is what I'm finding rather frustrating... They do at least have the schedule out to the teams in the pits, but putting it online doesn't seem to be a high priority... Oh well - hopefully it'll be up by the time matches start!

[PaW]

Looks like they're up now...

Archimedes
Curie
Galileo
Newton

[MooreteP]

Schedule is up!

[Solidstate89]

Might be a stupid question but are these schedules updated if they fall behind? Curie fell behind by at least half an hour today but when I went to go check on TEam 1507's last game of the day it wasn't scheduled for 4:30 local time anymore but moved to 5:00. Are they dynamically updated based on current delay and if so, how often?

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Solidstate89

Might be a stupid question but are these schedules updated if they fall behind? Curie fell behind by at least half an hour today but when I went to go check on TEam 1507's last game of the day it wasn't scheduled for 4:30 local time anymore but moved to 5:00. Are they dynamically updated based on current delay and if so, how often?

I believe they are. At least, the Qual Schedule one is updated just about every match that I've seen; Match Results doesn't seem to get updated nearly as often with respect to upcoming match times (though played matches are given a timestamp showing when they were played).

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by Andrew1261

Does anyone know when the match schedules are going to be released? I've heard reports of Wednesday/ Thursday but was curious if anyone had extra details.

Schedules cannot be generated until Check-in closes. That is until they know exactly which teams/robots are present and which are not. I have seen a few robots that managed to get to the Championship without their team over the years. At the Championship they will probably wait to release the schedule until ALL divisions are fully accounted for.

I'd say Thursday morning at the earliest