The merits of treating robotics tourneys like a game of Fire Emblem

[Amy33Amy33]

So at 10K lakes, we had an argument between a mentor and the scouting captain over the methodology used to scout. The mentor obviously won, as using time tested methodology is safer. But I want to talk about the methodology of the scouting captain.

See, our team has struggled with scouting a lot over the years, so this year we elected a freshman as our scouting captain to breath fresh life into our scouting system given that we're a fairly small team and we never have enough people to run a full six person scouting team, so we usually end up trying to run a six person scouting team built for six people with two people. The mentor was right in that at an actual competition, running a scouting team for six with two people, especially in the rare year that our robot didn't break much at all and we actually had six people to run a scouting team (YES!) (Well we did, until our electrical was ripped out of the robot and we needed to rewire the whole robot on the fly which was no bueno for the scouting team which was basically the electrical team with pencils...)

But I'm not here to talk about the methodology of the mentor, we all know what a six person scouting team is and how it works.

I'm here to talk about the methodology of the student.

See, the student is a bit of a Fire Emblem addict.

Since I was elected marketing captain, and since I was a junior, I had a 3DS gathering dust on a table, and after I broke up with my boyfriend and he never wanted to be friends with me ever again (he was my gaming buddy, and the person who had introduced me to gaming when I was in elementary school) I basically quit gaming, it was genuinely a useless waste of time. Except, I didn't really want to sell my 3DS, I still pulled out Pokemon Mystery Dungeon once in a while, I was like that old person who owns a sewing machine but doesn't use it, but doesn't want to get rid of it. So when my buddy the scouting captain was like "I want to play fire emblem for the new 3DS but I'm a high school student on a robotics team and I'm poor" I was like "Bruh, here, you can use it for a while"

Hasn't given it back yet...

Anyways, here's how it works. He sits there and watches the robots and talks. All the robots. His assistant sits next to him, and takes all the notes. The person taking notes switches out periodically to tell the drive team what's been going on.

Part of the reason that he lost the argument was personal, the guy missed the practice matches on the first day to take a test, though I'm not sure if he needed to be there, our team doesn't scout on the first day except for it does all the pit scouting on the first day. The other part of the reason was that we actually got a printer and printed out the notes for the mentor, and the notes were basically a log of

Match 1, R22 - B94, R: 1Robot, 2Robot, 3Robot, B: 4Robot, 5Robot, 6Robot

1Robot is terrible
2Robot is terrible
3Robot is terrible

With an occasional comment of

4Robot mediocre, do not let 4Robot use autonomous

and

5Robot great with feeder.

Not very useful if you're a mentor, and definitely not the sort of thing marketing would want leaked onto the internet. But the list actually makes sense if you think about it the way that he was thinking about it. The notes aren't strategy notes. They're a battle log, each of the robots are characters. The game, Fire Emblem. His strategy for scouting relied on treating robots like characters in Fire Emblem, treating their actions like weapons, and treating the totes as enemies on a map, and treating the game itself like a weird map in Fire Emblem. One problem though. If you are judging characters in Fire Emblem on strengths and weaknesses, you can't do so unless you have character death. Ricken dies alot, so I wont use him. When Robin uses swords, he dies more often. If you treat robots breaking down as death, you aren't going to be able to judge them effectively. A thing that you will notice very quickly if you are an outsider reading his notes is that every robot except for the top three or so are terrible, but also that his notes are in chronological order, top being the beginning of the match, bottom being the end.

Match 1, R22 - B94, R: 1Robot, 2Robot, 3Robot, B: 4Robot, 5Robot, 6Robot

1Robot is terrible, tipped during auto
4Robot is mediocre, do not let 4Robot use autonomous
6Robot = slow reaction time, is terrible
2Robot is terrible
3Robot is terrible
4Robot is terrible
5Robot great with feeder.

Basically, he built character death into his system to judge robots more effectively. By judging chronologically where the robots are terrible, you can create a rank list, building experience into the system by ranking robots against eachother, and not ranking the outcomes of match one against the outcomes of match 64, but by ranking the outcomes against each other, and then combining them to form a ranking, using match scores to break ties.

Match 30, R:50 - B: 90

7Robot is terrible, crashed into 8Robot
9Robot is terrible
10Robot is terrible
6Robot is terrible
8Robot is good on toes
11Robot is great on feeder

Rank list. Bottom = Want
1Robot
7Robot
9Robot
10Robot
4Robot
6Robot
2Robot
3Robot
4Robot
8Robot
5Robot
11Robot

Of course, this list either requires pit scouting data to interpret or someone who has memorized all the robots, but oddly enough our scouting captain pretty much did memorize all the robots, and I'm sure we all have a pretty good idea of how he did it...

http://i59.tinypic.com/20ro4l1.png

All that's left to do is refine the system, and get some actual criteria to define death, and it should actually work well. Maybe add in a third person to compile and run information to the drive team