OPR vs Record at championship

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Ivan Malik

I forgot just how bad 8 matches is at sorting... add in the 40ish extra teams and its even worse... Smaller divisions are a must in the future.

For those who are way better at statistics than I am, would doubling the number of divisions, but halving the teams in each division result in better sorting? Same number of matches (more would be helpful) but a smaller group to sort...

You could keep the same number of fields; heck there could be two "pools" per field and have the winners of the pools play each other to determine the field champion. The field champion would then represent the field on Einstein.

The answer to this is to consider what would happen if you took it to the extreme: what if you had pools of 6 robots that played 8 matches against each other, and they had a single round playoff of one alliance against another to determine the pool winner, then gradually played against the other pool winners, tournament-style?

The answer: as you reduce the pool size, you reduce the chance of the objectively "best" robot actually winning the entire competition and increase the effect of luck - the best robot might have 4-5 mediocre robots in their pool to pick from, and so can't win the whole thing against an alliance of 3 medium robots from another pool. Put another way: the pool results would be very accurate (the best robot would tend to win all the time), but the overall results would be less accurate since the best robot might not have good robots to take to inter-pool play with it.

The main way to make championships more "accurate" is to play more matches, which really comes down to field-hours: you either need more fields for the same hours, or to simply use the 4 fields you've got for longer hours in the days you've got. Or you need to use Einstein to play more matches.