The Great Database

[Spatel7793]

Well as an ex-scout and now mentor, I'm gonna have to add some of my experience.

Anupam, I understand your want for The Great Database, but I feel it will turn out like Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin-->it does not exist. But I'm not trying to discourage you by any means. Ideally, I would love for there to be a database for all the teams, but there are just so many different things to consider.

You have scoring, maneuverability, driver's skill, hanging, endgame bonuses, sometimes human player.

You can have 3 high scoring robots on an alliance, but if the drivers can't cooperate and bump into each other the entire time, the opposing alliance has a chance.

For example, during Lunacy, the plan was for Exploding Bacon (shoutout to you guys!), because tbh they were the lowest scoring team on our alliance, to play defense on our opposing alliance. They did great the first match and we were confident we were going to win. Then my team got pinned and we lost the 2nd match. Got pinned in 3rd match, but out of nowhere Bacon came swinging and won the match for us with a last minute unload into the trailers of the pinning robots.

I mean, its not all about statistics, sometimes its about how you can cooperate and how you improvise.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by Spatel7793

I mean, its not all about statistics, sometimes its about how you can cooperate and how you improvise.

Right, and as I said above, I don't wish this to replace actual experience. There's a movie that comes to mind called "Left of the Curve" that deals with this same concept. The baseball scouts all were riled up about one prospect because of his numbers, but one of the old men scouts who didn't just use a computer knew from observation that he couldn't hit a curveball.

I'm in no way in support of numerical data replacing actual experience or observations, I just feel like having such a resource could be beneficial as a secondary resource to go back and look at, with the primary being upfront observations. This list will likely only be the most useful during the first round, not the 2nd round.

The purpose of this is to have a compiled list of statistics to help as a secondary source for scouting and primarily to be used before a match to look at whether your alliance is more offensive, defensive, and which robots to aim for when defending.

Originally Posted by Ty Tremblay

This is a very interesting idea. A few details we should hash out first:

1. How are we going to submit/store the data?
2. Who will be in charge of maintaining the data?

If we make a few gross estimations (and correct me if these are too gross):

• 78 regionals & districts
• 75 matches per event
• 6 teams per match

Then we can estimate that we'll have something on the order of 35,000 total entries.

We definitely can start with a shared google doc (though overtime that would definitely be much too short. We can compile on event per spreadsheet and keep all of the event spreadsheets in the same folder.

[jlmcmchl]

Originally Posted by Wing

We definitely can start with a shared google doc (though overtime that would definitely be much too short. We can compile on event per spreadsheet and keep all of the event spreadsheets in the same folder.

There's actually an easier solution here. If you break up the google spreadsheet into multiple pages, one for each event, the data becomes much easier, especially for sorting and analysis. There, you still have all the data on one spreadsheet, but it's still comprehensible.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by jlmcmchl

There's actually an easier solution here. If you break up the google spreadsheet into multiple pages, one for each event, the data becomes much easier, especially for sorting and analysis. There, you still have all the data on one spreadsheet, but it's still comprehensible.

We can definitely do this to some extend, but one thing to note is that google spreadsheets only allows a limited quantity of cells. I know because we tried to have one sheet per event for Fantasy FIRST, but we hit the limit when trying to put them all into one spreadsheet. We can probably go week by week, and put week 1 events into one spreadsheet, week 2 events in another, etc.

[jlmcmchl]

Originally Posted by Wing

We can definitely do this to some extend, but one thing to note is that google spreadsheets only allows a limited quantity of cells. I know because we tried to have one sheet per event for Fantasy FIRST, but we hit the limit when trying to put them all into one spreadsheet. We can probably go week by week, and put week 1 events into one spreadsheet, week 2 events in another, etc.

I happen to be on the FF team TeamRUSH, and we got all of our pick lists and final picks, along with a summary and draft dates on a multi-page spreadsheet. Was each sheet filled with data for your team?

[stingray27]

I agree that this year OPR will be a good estimation of team performance. Again it is up to how you want to analyze it but I believe it will work out pretty well (except how penalties from another team add to anothers OPR). So with that in mind, I am very close to completely an Android App that I will release prior to competition season that will calculate team stats.

This app will have automatic OPR calculations on the fly as long as you have internet connection. It will take information from The Blue alliance, usfirst.org, The first alliance and FRC-Spy (the twitter xml feed). Will all of this data, it should be very accurate. Now instead of waiting until all of the matches are over to calculate OPR, all you have to do is hit refresh and it gives the OPR values up to that point. I got it down so it calculates a 100 team tournament in under 5 sec and on average takes 3 sec to calculate.

The app will also have average score, max score, rank, and all of the capabilities that FRC Tracker has (match results, team listings, team info, etc).

I also am going to add Match Predicting based on OPR and DPR and predict all future matches in a tournament when you hit the update button.

Anyone think that this will be useful?