Computer generated initial alliances

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

It's generally bad to classify how good or bad a team is by their age. In 2007 FIRST tried to implement something like your suggestion to balance the matches. Each event was broken into the lower third of team numbers, the middle third and the upper third. Each alliance would then be composed of one team from each.

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

They tried that once, and it was a miserable failure. The teams were divided into 3 "pools" based on team number, and each alliance got one from A, one from B and one from C. Which meant that you as a rookie team could never be paired with one of the other good rookie teams, but you could be playing against them.

I don't think FIRST was behind the Alliance Algorithm of Doom. The software developer was told to change it after the first week's matchups were universally recognized as being very bad. It got a teeny bit better, but the underlying method of splitting the teams into three groups based on team number wouldn't go away.