Scoring System Problems

[hektormagee]

Hey, I'm from Team Rush 27 and I'm wondering if any of the other regionals had trouble with the automatic scoring system. At the Kettering Invitational, some crucial matches had to be re-played because the scoring system either didn't count balls, started counting down, rather then up, etc. I know the people were doing their best to fix the issue, and I applaud them for fixing it and getting refs to count the scores when it took too long, but the invitational ran VERY late. Have any of the other invitationals had this problem?

[mizscience]

There were a quite a few field delays at the Florida Regional, but only one match had to be re-played due to lost scores. That said, as soon as that issue occurred, people were assigned to each to each goal to manually record the scoring for the rest of the competition, just in case the issue occurred again. It was excellent thinking on the part of the people in charge of the field at the Florida Regional.

[hektormagee]

Yea, at the Kettering District event, they Attempted to fix it numerous times. At least 4 matches (Including 2 Semi-Final matches) had to be replayed.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by hektormagee

Hey, I'm from Team Rush 27 and I'm wondering if any of the other regionals had trouble with the automatic scoring system. At the Kettering Invitational, some crucial matches had to be re-played because the scoring system either didn't count balls, started counting down, rather then up, etc. I know the people were doing their best to fix the issue, and I applaud them for fixing it and getting refs to count the scores when it took too long, but the invitational ran VERY late. Have any of the other invitationals had this problem?

I read in another thread that the scoring system will penalize you 2 points if the human players push a ball through the tunnels in the wrong direction. Perhaps this is what was happening at Kettering.

[davidmedeiros]

Actually yes, the same problem happened at the Arizona Regional this weekend.

Our alliance during one of our matches was penalized 22 points in one match due to the issue. The human player on our alliance (from our team, 842) swore he had returned all of the balls back to the field of play but nothing was done about it.

At the regional events one of the things I do is record all of our teams matches to just see how we had done on each match and my video did indeed show that every ball was returned to the match just as the human player had said.

We tried to appeal the match by offering the video as proof and the head ref said our argument was probably correct, but he couldn't accept the video as proof as per one of the rules.

Our team in no way is bitter about what happened at all, we accept it as just "one of those things" that happened.
I am glad however it wasn't just us that have had the problem.

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by davidmedeiros

Our alliance during one of our matches was penalized 22 points in one match due to the issue. The human player on our alliance (from our team, 842) swore he had returned all of the balls back to the field of play but nothing was done about it.

Did you verify that the number of balls the scoring system recorded as scored matched the number of balls that went into the goal and that all the balls that were "returned" passed through the ball counter on the rails?

[hektormagee]

Yes. All these errors were verified (by the head ref) and every time the robot scored a ball, the counter counted down, not up. The matches were replayed because of the issue. It wasn't the ball return penalty. Does the system automatically count the penalty? Because I think (not at all sure) that those are factored in after the actual score. Otherwise, wouldn't the other team's qualification points be altered by them scoring??

[ahecht]

The scoring system is designed intentionally to subtract two points if a ball passes backwards through the ball counter in the goals. This does not show up as a penalty, it just decrements the score. If the ball bounces in such a way that it is seen to go forwards and then backwards, the scoring system will decrement the score by 1 instead of increasing it by one.

[EricH]

Arizona also saw 4 balls counted as 2 for some reason. That one was caught and fixed.

The refs can't review video per <T03>. There have been several threads on making video replay official, but the general consensus from those is 1) there isn't a good way to do it under time constraints, 2) there isn't a good way to do it under cost constraints, and 3) it wouldn't change a whole lot of calls.

[DCA Fan]

In San Diego I believe we had two matches in which the computer score did not match what we observed on the field; our sharp-eyed referees quickly caught and corrected the problem.

[davidmedeiros]

Originally Posted by Vikesrock

Did you verify that the number of balls the scoring system recorded as scored matched the number of balls that went into the goal and that all the balls that were "returned" passed through the ball counter on the rails?

Yes. It counted a total of 8 shots and 7 of the balls were returned. The last ball shot was in at the very last second so it didn't count as one needing to be returned to the field of play.


We did discuss it with the head ref and he told us there was nothing we could do. There was no replay of our match, nor were there any point altering. We just took the 22 point hit for the match.

Again, the team isn't bitter at all about what happened. It's more of we want to make sure it's known as an issue that should be made aware of.

[Radical Pi]

At FLR there was one match where midway through the match a robot's battery fell out and disconnected, and at the same time scores for that alliance started to go minus and not plus, reaching a grand total of -2 at the end of the match

[JBotAlan]

Originally Posted by Radical Pi

... and at the same time scores for that alliance started to go minus and not plus, reaching a grand total of -2 at the end of the match

This is perhaps the most perplexing of the field faults for me, mostly because I have a hard time wrapping my mind around how you mess this up.

Does anyone know of a legitimate reason the real-time score should ever be negative? The rules have always been pretty clear on the issue of negative scores...granted, the rule says "Final score" but I still think that displaying a negative score does nothing but cause confusion.

<G06> Minimum Score - The minimum final score is zero points.

Jacob

[PAR_WIG1350]

Lets just hope it doesn't try to pull a divide by zero on us and suffer an unrecoverable crash {e.g. dumps all memory accumulated from the previous day or two of quals and all the QP's and cooperation bonuses, etc.}.

[EricH]

The system is supposed to be backed up every now and again--usually during longish breaks (like lunch). If it did crash like that, most of the data would most likely survive.