2014 District Point Model Analysis

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Mr V

Being on the District Championship winning alliance does not earn you an automatic spot at World Championship. It is highly likely that you will earn a spot with the points that you earn from being on the winning alliance, but it could be possible that the 2nd pick doesn't make the cut. This is done to give those teams from the Valleys of Doom a better chance of moving on and tries to minimize the chances of that 16th pick getting a ride on the coat tails of the #1 seed.

This is incorrect. Winning District Championship does give you a bid to Champs. Those teams are then 'eliminated' in regards to looking at standings for the points-based slots.

[Nathan Streeter]

Very cool graphs! Comparing the first two graphs is definitely very cool... it really does show how much of an improvement the district system should make in sending good robots onward!

[Thad House]

Originally Posted by DevenStonow

This is incorrect. Winning District Championship does give you a bid to Champs. Those teams are then 'eliminated' in regards to looking at standings for the points-based slots.

Actually they told us in the last district meeting that winning the Championship does NOT get you an automatic bid to worlds. I don't really understand it, but if that's what they decided then that's what they decided.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by sst.thad

Actually they told us in the last district meeting that winning the Championship does NOT get you an automatic bid to worlds. I don't really understand it, but if that's what they decided then that's what they decided.

It's not automatic but the points involved typical result in it? /speculation

[alectronic]

That's correct. There is no automatic bid- but if you think about it, a winning team would be (assuming no backup bots) 30 points for winning multiplied by 3 for being a district championship. That's 90 points, which should be plenty to put that team in a good position to advance regardless.

[Nathan Streeter]

At least for New England, the winners at DCMP will move on to CMP automatically, as mentioned at the bottom of this link... http://www.nefirst.org/2014/02/04/ne...structure-faq/

I'm not sure if this is a global FIRST decision or an NEFIRST decision... I don't think it is mentioned in either this blog post (http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...Kickoff-Taping) or the official points supplement (http://www3.usfirst.org/sites/defaul...ng_System.pdf).

[Jessica Boucher]

Originally Posted by Nathan Streeter

At least for New England, the winners at DCMP will move on to CMP automatically, as mentioned at the bottom of this link... http://www.nefirst.org/2014/02/04/ne...structure-faq/

I'm not sure if this is a global FIRST decision or an NEFIRST decision... I don't think it is mentioned in either this blog post (http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...Kickoff-Taping) or the official points supplement (http://www3.usfirst.org/sites/defaul...ng_System.pdf).

This is the way I understand it - but I'm checking in on this. Thanks for the patience!

[Jessica Boucher]

Following up - this was a misunderstanding on my part. Teams who win the District Championship do not receive auto-bids to the FIRST Championship, but as you smart people already figured out, they're going to slide to the top of the invite list because of winning anyway.

Post is updated. Life is an iterative process.

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by Jessica Boucher

Life is an iterative process.

+1

Hope this clears up any confusion I've created:

1. Rookie Advantage Points

• Teams in their first season ("Rookies") will receive 10 points
• Teams in their second season will receive 5 points
• Rookie season used for calculations is based on FIRST records

2. Qualification Round Performance

• Teams will receive 2 points for each match they win
• Teams will receive 1 point for each match they tie
• Teams do not receive points for surrogate rounds or rounds in which they are disqualified^

3. Alliance Selection Results

• Alliance Captains (#1 to #8) will receive points equal to 17 minus their captain number
• Drafted teams (Picks #1 to #16) will receive points equal to 17 minus their acceptance order number
• Points are based on positions at the conclusion of alliance selection, not at the end of qualification rounds

4. Elimination Round Performance

• Each member of the alliance that wins a given round (quarterfinals, semifinals or finals) will receive 5 points for each match in which their robot participated
• Backup robots will receive points in place of the replaced robot starting at the point of the replacement (even if that falls mid-round)
• Points are only awarded to an alliance that advances. An eliminated alliance receives no points in the round in which they were eliminated even if they won a match in that series

5. Awards Received

• Teams will receive 5 points for each judged award won
• Teams that win the Engineering Inspiration or Rookie All-Star awards will receive an additional 3 points
• The team that wins the Chairman's award will receive an additional 5 points
• Only judged awards receive points (performance based awards do not receive award points)
• Only awards presented to a team accumulate points (i.e. Deans List or awards to a person do not earn district ranking points)

Not that it would affect us in the PNW, but I'm curious how NEF will handle Legacy teams. Legacy and HOF teams get a championship ticket regardless, but does that have an effect on how many teams get sent to Champs? I'm wondering as FIRST reaches critical mass if they'll lump these teams in with the total amount of championship slots a district will get...

[Jessica Boucher]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

+1
Not that it would affect us in the PNW, but I'm curious how NEF will handle Legacy teams. Legacy and HOF teams get a championship ticket regardless, but does that have an effect on how many teams get sent to Champs? I'm wondering as FIRST reaches critical mass if they'll lump these teams in with the total amount of championship slots a district will get...

This was obviously a big deal for us. Currently, our six Legacy and HOF teams (FRC 23, 126, 151, 175, 190, 236) do not affect our 24 slots under the Unified Point Model, nor does any auto-bid team in any other district. Consequently, this also means some of them are choosing to skip the District Championship to give other teams an opportunity to play on a bigger stage, which has its good and bad points, but is understandable.

[MechEng83]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

5. Awards Received

• Teams will receive 5 points for each judged award won
• Teams that win the Engineering Inspiration or Rookie All-Star awards will receive an additional 3 points
• The team that wins the Chairman's award will receive an additional 5 points
• Only judged awards receive points (performance based awards do not receive award points)
• Only awards presented to a team accumulate points (i.e. Deans List or awards to a person do not earn district ranking points)

Just to clarify the 2nd and 3rd bullets, because I was confused when I first read this: Engineering Inspiration is worth a total of 8 points (5+3) and Chairman's Award is worth a total of 10 points (5+5). The official document from FIRST lists those as the total number of points for the award, rather than saying it's a judged award (5 pts) + the extra.

[Navid Shafa]

Originally Posted by MechEng83

Just to clarify the 2nd and 3rd bullets, because I was confused when I first read this: Engineering Inspiration is worth a total of 8 points (5+3) and Chairman's Award is worth a total of 10 points (5+5). The official document from FIRST lists those as the total number of points for the award, rather than saying it's a judged award (5 pts) + the extra.

Correct

[Navid Shafa]

The point system scoring I mentioned above was taken from the new PNW District Ranking Website:

http://district.firstwa.org/

[Thad House]

For the lower seeds (5-8), it helps all 3 qualify. If you are the 3rd pick on a 1-4 alliance, that might not get enough points for you to make it, because if you face a 5-8 seed in the finals, all 3 of those bots will have more points then a 13-16th picked bot.

I will say this most likely won't happen, but if a team this year wins the championship but does not make it to worlds on points, I think there will be a huge outrage, and I will fight to make it so the winners make it to worlds, because thats how it should be no matter what.

[MikeE]

There are some other interesting observations from analysis of the 2013 district events using the Unified District Points Model.

Perhaps the most interesting is the basic histogram of points per event. The 17 district events held during the 2013 season had the following distribution:



As expected this shows a multimodal distribution which roughly corresponds to one component for teams who don't make the eliminations (tall bump to the left) another broader component for teams receiving seeding points then a long tail for teams reaching the last stages of elimination.
This year there are 39 districts, a large jump from last year's 17 events so there will be more data and we'll get a better model of the underlying distribution..

The second observation is the impact of district size. From a team perspective the majority of points are given for seeding/elimination performance. These are always split between 24 teams that make the eliminations so at smaller events where the likelihood of getting to elims is higher there is a correspondingly higher average point score per team.

In 2013 the largest district had 43 teams and the smallest 31 with an average point score of 24.4 and 29.2 respectively. This year the spread in size across all Districts is even greater with the largest event at 45 teams (Bridgewater-Raritan in MAR) and smallest event at 28 teams (Mt Vernon in PNW). The expected points per team just based on event size would be 23.8 and 31.0 respectively.

The following table shows the expected (average) points for hypothetical teams attending the two smallest or two largest events in each of the Districts:

Dist  Smallest    pts   Largest    pts  Diff
MAR     33, 34   55.8    40, 40   49.1   6.6
PNW     28, 29   61.3    35, 35   54.4   6.9
FiM     31, 35   56.4    40, 40   50.6   5.8
NE      32, 33   56.7    40, 40   50.6   6.1

So choosing smaller events gives a 6 to 7 point advantage or almost as much as the rookie bonus.

Finally the graph below shows the average total points scored split by team qualification score.



It's not a surprise to see the points increase as a team wins more matches, but above 8 wins the average points per event grows far more quickly. Seeding points make a small difference but this is mostly due to the same observation as above that 70% of all district events were won by the top alliance (and every district event was won by a top 3 alliance).