Car Knack Predicts

[Bill Beatty]

Car Knack Predicts

Junior did a fine job conveying our thoughts for "Stack Attack," however he did omit some very key predictions.

1. In the Regionals, during qualifying rounds 20 per cent of the matches will have at least one of the four human players not complete their task, i.e., not returning in 10 seconds, not placing upright, placing out of scoring zone etc.

2. In the elimination rounds, three game matches will by very rare, not more than five in all the regionals.

3. At the Nationals there will be no three game elimination matches.

4. In all the elimination matches, the team that wins the first game will advance more than 90 per cent of the time.

5. Because of the 30 second penalty rule, teams will be reluctant to shut their robot down when their automatous program goes wrong which will force the FIRST officials to shut them down much more often than if no such penalty existed.

6. Because of the "everyone must run" rule during elimination's, a surprising number of second games will be two on one.

7. The concessioner that is selling long tether cords by the practice field is going to do really well.


Car Knack has spoken.

[killawattz]

SHIIIIIIIIPt- POOOOFFFFFF- They got a 25 foot tether long ago.
right on ! You must miss Johnny too!!

[Jay5780]

Don't repost! Just edit your original one. I know it's not my job to say something, but it is very annoying.

[Joe Johnson]

Bill,

Your predictions cost me a lot of lost sleep.

I hope you are wrong but I fear you are mostly right.

One of the great and terrible things about FIRST is that you have to commit to a design direction before you know for sure that it is the right way to go.

I have seen a lot of robots posted on our site. Some scare me. Some make me laugh out loud they are so clever. Most fall into the vast middle where with luck they will go far but without luck they will be an also ran... ...But the Beatty Beast 2003, this is a robot I cannot wait to set my eyes on.

We shall see if The Beatty Maneuver 2003 is a winner.

Joe J.

[Bill Beatty]

Joe

Good to hear from you. It doesn't seem like you have made very many posts this year. By now we usually have traded comments about the years game.

I think my biggest disappointment is the scoring for the eliminations. (and what Car Knack was trying to say in his own way) They have reduced it to a one game elimination. Here we are in the finals for the National Championship with two strong and powerful alliances, and the alliance that wins the first match will win the championship. You might as well not even play the second match. Not my idea of a great competition. Any comments?

My second biggest disappointment is the extremely heavy bias to the KOH robots. Two-thirds of the robots will be bulldozers trying to stay on top. Unfortunately, we always try and do something a bit different, and I fear that could be our downfall this year.

Regards,

Bill Beatty

The Terminator movies were great , but I liked Terminator I the best. With outer covering and both legs blown off, he still keeps coming!

[Harrison]

Originally posted by Bill Beatty
I think my biggest disappointment is the scoring for the eliminations. (and what Car Knack was trying to say in his own way) They have reduced it to a one game elimination. Here we are in the finals for the National Championship with two strong and powerful alliances, and the alliance that wins the first match will win the championship. You might as well not even play the second match. Not my idea of a great competition. Any comments?

Yeah, by keeping the 2x loser score in for the elim rounds, it can easily be won in one good match. Ties after 2...there will be pretty well none.

Last year worked well....have some 'luck' (3x losers score) in the qualification rounds...but once you got into the elimination, the winner won - and that was it. Now we have to win, but by 1 point (ideally) in the elimination rouds as well.

Teams: Make sure someone in the driver station can keep track of the score at all times....espcially this year.

[JVN]

Originally posted by Harrison
Now we have to win, but by 1 point (ideally) in the elimination rouds as well.

I disagree...
I think the key to this year's eliminations is to construct a good alliance, that can win big in BOTH elimination round matches. If you win both elim matches, you advance, and it doesn't matter what your EP's are.

The most difficult thing about this year, comes from scouting, building alliances, choosing which bots to put in first, and deciding on which strategies/automodes to use.

I predict that most top 4 alliances will consist of at least 2 (top 8)seeded teams. This will help with the construction of stronger alliances. I know that if we seed in the 5-8 range, we will be approaching 1-4 teams and asking to work together. If you are in the low seeding ranges, especially at some of the smaller regionals, it will be extremely hard for you to build a strong alliance.

I think it will be common for the 10th, 11th, and even 12th seeded teams to pick an alliance.

FIRST truly has created a game to drive strategists and scouts crazy...

[Jeff_Rice]

Huh.

I somehow got the impression that if you refuse to partner with a team, you were out.

Oh well.

I've been saying oh well a lot lately.

[MBurr-Mecum]

If a team above you picks you and you refuse to partner with them, you cannot be picked by another team later on, but if you are seeded high enough you can pick other teams. The result is that if you refuse and don't seed, you are out, and even if you do seed your alliance will probably not be as strong as if you had accepted.

[Joe Johnson]

I disagree somewhat with Beatty and Beatty concerning their prediction that the team that wins the first match will almost always win the 2 match series.

It is probable that they are right but it is possible that another scenerio can come into play.

Allow me to explain.

Given that the team that advances has to win the game that has the highest total score (winner's score plus loser's score), once a team realizes that it is going down, I believe that they will do everthing in their power to make the total score as low as possible. This includes getting off the ramp at the end and emptying their own bin scoring zone.

I think that it is possible that the Beatty Maneuver 2003 will have some variability to it as the Beatty Maneuver 2002 did -- For example, they sometimes failed to get all three goals in 5 seconds last year. In this case, a team would know fairly early whether or not they had a chance to win the match or not. This would give them almost 2 minutes not to try to win but rather two work to get the total score as low as possible. This makes sense because the next round out, The Manuever may fail and then the opposing team can go on to try to win with a higher total score than the first round.

I don't know if I am right about this, but I can definitely see it happening by the time we get to Texas.

Joe J.

[Joe Johnson]

I agree that FIRST made a significant mistake in giving 25 points to the King of the Hill.

The degree of difficulty of stacking boxes vs. getting on the top of the ramp does not justify the relatively large score of 25 points for getting on top of the ramp.

I view this as somewhat the same as the ease of getting "home" via a tether last year being given the same point value as getting 10 balls in goal -- there was no contest what was the easier task. How many tethers where there at the Championships? How many teams could reliably get 10 balls in the goal? The votes are in and I suppose that it was a landslide.

It will most likely be a landslide this year as well when it comes how many teams will be able to stack in Texas vs how many teams are playing the King of the Hill game.

Joe J.

[Bill Beatty]

Joe,

I agree if it is an obvious blowout in the first game, the other team will knock the score down as far as possible. However, I think a much more likely scenario is a tough match between two closely matched alliances and with the score too close to call. A team is not going to knock down the score if there is any chance to win because to loose the first match is going to be almost always fatal. If you loose the first one, at that point, the finals are over.

Regards

[sevisehda]

I think that the 25 points for the ramp will be awarded much less than teams would like. With all the shoving at the top of the ramp, and especailly the last few seconds bots will be pushed off slightly or will be touching there partner. Being on the ramp will be easy being on the ramp 100% much harder.

I doubt many teams will go toward ramp-doms, so far I have seen only a few, including swampthing, trucktown's ramp/alley-dom, and the Clarkson billboard. Some teams may be able to lock onto the HDPE or shove some but there not ramp-doms. The majority of bots are either low-riding arms or internal stackers.

I like the idea of having all the teams play in finals. It adds another level to choosing an alliance. You have to construct a reliable alliance. I haven't heard of many scores from scrimages but I think that ramp-doms will probobly not be seeded high enough to choose alliances, sorry John, but they will be scooped up by the top seeds quickly.