Coaches keeping track of score

[Cyberguy34000]

In the kickoff video did anyone notice them mention something about a tactician that would be keeping track of the scoring and tube placement? In the one video shot that they had of him, he a pad of paper of the rack, presumably to keep track of tube placement. Placement of the tubes is incredibly important this year, and strategically positioning them for maximum score looks to be vital to win the game.

So my question to the CD community is... What tools could/should the Coach/Tactician use to help keep track of tubes/scoring? Is memory and mad mental math skills enough?

-Chris

[macgyver]

i know in one of the kit boxes i had saw a small dry erase board ( the one in the video to use for the tactician)

[chris31]

Originally Posted by macgyver

i know in one of the kit boxes i had saw a small dry erase board ( the one in the video to use for the tactician)

Thats what I thought. However it is just a clipboard.

[b_mallerd]

Are laptops allowed to be brought onto the playing field?

I already coded up a quick and dirty version of the rack (looks just like an 3x8 tic tac toe board) which allows you to enter in pieces and gives u a score in real time. The only problem in using this would be the fact that you can't really see the other side of the board.

Neone know some awsome connect four players?

[Graham Donaldson]

I think the "tactician" was the coach.

[Jeff Rodriguez]

I knew I should have gotten that tablet PC.

[NoSkaOnTheRadio]

i'm with macgyver on this one; a small dry erase board should be enough. as long as your tactician can hand two different markers and tell the difference between red and blue, keeping track of the tubes already on the spiderlegs shouldn't be a problem. the challenge for the tactician will be to figure out which spiderlegs the team should try to place their inner tubes on. obviously the middle row will be the most important, but the strategic value of certain spiderlegs could change constantly based on the state of the rack. i say make your tactician the most pragmatic and logical person on the team.

as for b_mallerd's question, i don't think laptops are allowed on the field. i could be wrong, but i think that was the rule last year. if you are allowed, though, an interesting project would be to implement an algorithm in your program to determine and suggest which spiderlegs would be most advantageous to target based on the state of the rack at any given moment. just a thought. i'd be very impressed if you could do it.

[Kevin Sevcik]

I was thinking about a pocket PC strategy computer. At the very least, it could point out places where you should be blcoking incipient super rows from the other alliance. I know everyone's convinced this could be a super high scoring game, but I think a good tactician is going to be blocking the super rows atleast as often as building super rows of her own. I suspect the really high scores will mostly come against weak opponents. No one's mentioned this yet, but defensive robots aren't just keeping opponents from building up rows, they're protecting the rows you're building up from being cut short by a well played opposing ringer. Your tactician(s) are going to have their hands full directing traffic and efficient coordination between teams is going to be key to success.

Also, I dispute that the middle row has any more importance than the other rows. Spoilling a vertical row of three from the bottom turns 8 points to 4 points just the same as spoilling from the middle or top. As such, I suspect the top row will be most important simply because there will be less teams than can place that high.

[Imajie]

Well people seem to hold the middle as very important because from there you can build left, right, up, or down.

[Pavan Dave]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I was thinking about a pocket PC strategy computer. At the very least, it could point out places where you should be blcoking incipient super rows from the other alliance. I know everyone's convinced this could be a super high scoring game, but I think a good tactician is going to be blocking the super rows atleast as often as building super rows of her own. I suspect the really high scores will mostly come against weak opponents. No one's mentioned this yet, but defensive robots aren't just keeping opponents from building up rows, they're protecting the rows you're building up from being cut short by a well played opposing ringer. Your tactician(s) are going to have their hands full directing traffic and efficient coordination between teams is going to be key to success.

Also, I dispute that the middle row has any more importance than the other rows. Spoilling a vertical row of three from the bottom turns 8 points to 4 points just the same as spoilling from the middle or top. As such, I suspect the top row will be most important simply because there will be less teams than can place that high.

Similarly me and my mentor were considering a project for my ISM course and one of the possibilities was to create a touchscreen little dealio with the rack and it would highlight your 3 best scoring options and it would give you 3 places you want to place a spoiler. We only got to the brainstorming but right now that wouldn't be that of an idea since in the Q&A they said that it was okay if one of the drivers was using it.

The software displaying the status of the dashboard information may also display the state of the field, and any estimated score. A laptop connected to the Dashboard Port of the Operator Interface would be considered part of the Operator Console. As such, the Coach may not touch the dashboard laptop without violating Rule <G49>.
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Pavan.

[Priyadarshy]

Originally Posted by b_mallerd

Neone know some awsome connect four players?

the strategy in connect four is to go for the center and in connect four the game piece falls to the bottom and in rack and roll any column can be considered the center so i guess the strategy might have only a few similarities to connect four

[Scion13]

I agree that the coaches this year won't necessarily have to know the exact score (which would be very difficult without some kind of device). All we have to do is know how many rows both alliances have and use common sense to figure out where to score to get the most points

[Bongle]

Hmmm... making a 3D coach-practice thing could be a fun little project for my graphics course, or really good practice for anyone.

Just make a game that shows a board layout (in 3D obviously or else the rack-reading skills won't transfer to real life), and has the coach type in the score of the rack. Have it as a goal to improve day over day.

Something like this:
-rack is displayed
-coach must type in current score, best spoiler-placement location and best ringer-placement location.

At first it could just be single-layer ringers, but afterwards you could add invalid rows (double-red or double-blue), spoilered rows, rows that have invalid spoilers (spoiler on top of red and blue or spoiler on a keeper). Being able to judge that on the fly would be a decent skill to have.

Edit: Actually, even in 2D it would be useful to get the principles of board-reading done. Maybe I'll toss it together tonight after I do some graphics homework.

[Scion13]

Figuring out the exact score will be hard, but ringer and spoiler placement would be useful

[lurburlnxc]

I have edited a program that can find the best location on the board and taper down to the worst location. It is based off Excel and you can download the original program here http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1907? . I have edited the program but i have a problem finishing this set of code in VB.
>>Public Function Change()
>> If newHigh = newHigh2 Then
>> cell.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'It says the error is here
>> cell2.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'And it could be here
>> If newHigh = newHigh3 Then
>> cell3.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'And here
>> If newHigh = newHigh4 Then cell4.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'and here
>> End If
>> Else
>> cell.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'and finally here
>> End If
>>End Function
Every time the program gets to this part of the code it gives a runtime error of '424'. I've defined the ranges and specified a variable with a type 'Range' which are called 'cell' 'cell2' etc. You get the point. If anyone can help me figure this out it would be greatly appriciated. I just started to learn VB like a week ago. I know Java, some C and C#, QBasic, TI-Basic (the graphing calculator language), and was going to try and teach myself HTML to create a proxy (just for fun). That's my experience. Hope you guys can help me out.