OPR Formula

[Tom Line]

That is not a stupid question.

OPR is actually a system of simultaneous equations. The difficulty lies in solving that many simultaneous equations.

For instance. In a standard district event in Michigan, there might be 80 matches.

Each match has equations that lay out like this:
Robot_1_score+Robot_2_score+Robot_3_score=Red_Scor e
Robot_4_score+Robot_5_score+Robot_6_score=Blue_Sco re

So, in the end you'll have a system with 160 equations, and 40 variables (each robot is one variable, as shown in the equations above). The trick is solving those equations. Until just recently, excel didn't have the firepower to do it unless you used macros. However, with the newer versions, the Matrix formulas are powerful enough to do it. Keep in mind this isn't like algebra - the computer has to iterate to find an answer.

This is not a simple process. It is fairly complicated. Look up "solving simultaneous equations using matrices" in excel, and you should be able to find some examples. That is how we wrote our OPR. It requires pretty in-depth knowledge of excel though. You'll have to understand named arrays, matrix math functions, and array formulas.

2834 the Bionic Barons put out an awesome OPR sheet that handles the calculations through some open-source macro code. It is far more complex (to me) than using matrix formulae, because I have never used macros and vb programming in excel.

Of course, programs like matlab have more advanced equation solvers and you may be able to easily write a program to perform the calculations.