2015 Waterloo Regional

[pacoliketaco]

Are we going to see 300+ this weekend? Can't see how 1114 + 2056 + ____ won't cross that.

[Chinmay]

wow... 252 just put up... im VERY impressed with the level of competition at waterloo

[Bochek]

1114's qualification average is now higher then the old world record high score.

[Mark Sheridan]

5406 is a phenomenal rookie team.

[Hallry]

Originally Posted by Bryce Paputa

284 points

Here's HD full-field footage of the record-breaking match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTz0ezZKMHQ

[donkehote]

Originally Posted by Hallry

Here's HD full-field footage of the record-breaking match: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTz0ezZKMHQ

Closer view with some full field and live scoring here.http://watchfirstnow.com/archives/122770292

Thanks Bochek! As always I love the quick match uploads and live video feeds from watchfirstnow!

[cmrnpizzo14]

Originally Posted by Mark Sheridan

5406 is a phenomenal rookie team.

I would say that they are phenomenal for any team!

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

How are 1114 and 2056 partners in back-to-back qualification matches?

There are 30 teams in attendance, and each team gets 13 qual matches. That means there are 26 spots for partners...

Given that who you are competing "against" doesn't matter this year, why would the match making algorithm possibly come up with a schedule with this quirk?

Makes me wonder: Has anyone out there tried writing a better scheduling app? Were you successful?

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

Given that who you are competing "against" doesn't matter this year, why would the match making algorithm possibly come up with a schedule with this quirk?

Originally Posted by Ether

Makes me wonder: Has anyone out there tried writing a better scheduling app? Were you successful?

FMS uses the same scheduling algorithm this year it has in the past: MatchMaker. The output of the algorithm shows the number of unique partners and "opponents" (which doesn't matter this year), and the scorekeeper makes sure they're all the same. This is harder to ensure at small events, especially when the algorithm also prioritizes a gap between teams' consecutive matches. It's typically common for a few different schedules be generated until the output is even, again especially with smaller events. Or, a schedule could be selected to try and have the teams who haven't passed inspection play their first match as late as possible, to make sure they can pass. So there are a lot of variables that go into generating a schedule, and sometimes these anomalies sneak through while selecting for other things.

While FIRST probably could have had IdleLoop update MatchMaker for this year and treat "opposing" robots the same as different matches, it probably wasn't worth the time/money/testing and they instead went with what was already known to work pretty well. Go figure.

[Racer26]

I can't be the only one who's noticed the sheer depth of this field.

29th seed in Waterloo has a QA high enough to be 4th alliance captain at Palmetto in week 1. Or 2nd alliance captain at NYC.

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Racer26

I can't be the only one who's noticed the sheer depth of this field.

29th seed in Waterloo has a QA high enough to be 4th alliance captain at Palmetto in week 1. Or 2nd alliance captain at NYC.

To be fair, part of that is Waterloo and part of that is week number. Waterloo's #29 (of 30) 57.1 QA would get you #32 of 39 in Central IL right now, #35 of 39 at Purdue, #39 of 40 at West MI, and #40 of 40 at St. Joe's. Yes, last place out of 40. Now that's nuts (#39 has 57.33).

I'm also not sure that QA is really a good proxy for depth, particularly after teams have played 10 matches in a field of 30. (The other events are at 8-9 matches each now--round of applause to the Waterloo field crew.) I haven't done any math to that effect, but Waterloo actually has the lowest #25 OPR of the events I mentioned, losing to next-to-last Central IL by almost 10 points (18.41 to 27.58).

Without knowing, I'd suspect that QAs might be less about depth all the way through and more about the density from the top being spread through their qual alliances. And it is really, really dense at the top: the #1 OPR at St. Joe's would put you #5 at Waterloo. I'd be interested in a fuller analysis, though. Let me think about the stats options.

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by plnyyanks

FMS uses the same scheduling algorithm this year it has in the past: MatchMaker. The output of the algorithm shows the number of unique partners and "opponents" (which doesn't matter this year), and the scorekeeper makes sure they're all the same. This is harder to ensure at small events, especially when the algorithm also prioritizes a gap between teams' consecutive matches. It's typically common for a few different schedules be generated until the output is even, again especially with smaller events. Or, a schedule could be selected to try and have the teams who haven't passed inspection play their first match as late as possible, to make sure they can pass. So there are a lot of variables that go into generating a schedule, and sometimes these anomalies sneak through while selecting for other things.

While FIRST probably could have had IdleLoop update MatchMaker for this year and treat "opposing" robots the same as different matches, it probably wasn't worth the time/money/testing and they instead went with what was already known to work pretty well. Go figure.

The cost function used by MatchMaker already prioritizes maximizing the number of partners over maximizing the number of opponents.
In my experience in the District model it's not a good idea to run MatchMaker several times since you're introducing more bias by manually selecting for specific features.

Originally Posted by Ether

Makes me wonder: Has anyone out there tried writing a better scheduling app? Were you successful?

Matchmaker does a very good job for typical regional sized events, where the set of reasonable solutions is fairly large, but it does not perform as well as smaller District sized events. I've played around with several other scheduling algorithms with some success for Districts where having a fixed number of qualification rounds makes it possible to pre-calculate much of the schedule.

[MikeE]

Originally Posted by donkehote

Closer view with some full field and live scoring here.http://watchfirstnow.com/archives/122770292

Thanks Bochek! As always I love the quick match uploads and live video feeds from watchfirstnow!

Waterloo is always one of my favourite events to watch, but this year's event is even more spectacular than usual.

It's very impressive how easy Q20 looked. If that's a preview of top level division play at Worlds, it's going to be fascinating, if not the most exciting for a casual spectator.

[Hallry]

Here are the elimination alliances:

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Ether

Makes me wonder: Has anyone out there tried writing a better scheduling app? Were you successful?

I've often wondered if the scheduling problem could be formulated as linear program and solved with a large LP solver.