Any information about a match schedule?

[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.