Match Scheduling

[Green Potato]

Originally Posted by K-Dawg157

I was thinking...

At the events, teams are randomly paired with other teams to create alliances and score as many points as they can. This means that some teams will get put with other teams multiple times, and other teams will never see that team.

This puts some teams at a disadvantage. If they never get matched with the best robot, there score will probably never be that good. So for the teams that were paired multiple times with that robot, their scores will be so much better, and if they are continuously paired with robots better than them, their ranking will actually be better than they deserve.

What I am proposing is to make the competitions so that each team gets paired with each of the other teams once No more, no less. Everyone is on the same alliance with all of the other teams at one point or another.

This would show the true value of the robot of the team instead of the possibility of a robot being carried into a high seed simply because of their alliance partners in Qualifications.

I realize this would result in longer competitions and scheduling would be more difficult, but that would be a true and fair representation of the robot instead of the robot's alliance partners.

Currently, there is an algorithm that decides match scheduling, at least for regionals, and it tries to do just that. However, minimizing repeated alliance partners / opponents is only second order sort behind maximizing time between matches. Also, I worry that for the larger events, it may be unreasonable to do so many matches, and scheduling would be difficult without a significant number of surrogates. Unsure how this works at districts, though, but I presume the algorithm is the same.