Real Week 2 update

[plnyyanks]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

The solution is in fact quite easy. It's a two-step scheduling algorithm that accounts for last season's performance. I believe that all of the professional sports leagues already do this. First, you sort the teams in bins A, B & C based on a ranking criterion--probably a system akin to the district point system. (Rookies = 0). Each match is scheduled by drawing a team from each bin for each alliance as an added step. All of the other constraints then come into place.

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

First I disagree with the assertion that randomness is the fairest decider, especially when we never get to a full probability distribution which would allow schedules to balance out over a one or even several regionals. Second, these algorithms are in fact not completely random. They have inherent patterns that are difficult to erase.

I believe it would be simple add the bin constraint--I doubt that it would have to be run more than once. The only added step which is quite easy is to assign the teams to the separate bins.

As for leaving scheduling to the judgement calls of the officials, I think that's fraught with danger. For example, how should we have treated 5136 at CVR? They had made it to Einstein in 2014 yet they are only a 3rd year team. I think a transparent algorithm solves the problem the best.

I think this is a noble goal, but the devil will be in the implementation details. Done poorly, we'll be even worse off then we are today. People old enough will remember the 2007 "Algorithm of Doom", which selected teams from three buckets like you're proposing (although those buckets were populated by team age).

The biggest issue will be correctly populating the buckets - this thread discusses many of the same ideas. You'll also have to account for buckets that aren't of equal size (by whatever metric you choose), especially when the number of teams attending is not a multiple of 3. Would this cause more surrogates to be used, or something else?

Are you proposing using previous year's data, because that runs into trouble with fast team turnover and the potential for powerhouse teams to have down years, only to be paired with other powerhouses more often the following year. Plus, what do you do with rookies? They have no data to rely on yet, and there are always exceptional rookie teams, which would cause the same kind of inconsistency.

If you use current season data, what would you do for early events? You wouldn't have any data available for the early weeks, so you'd have to resort to a randomness-based algorithm again. This approach would only work for District Champs/World Champs, where all teams are already guaranteed to have played already.

Plus, Ed Law made a great point in the other thread I linked:

Originally Posted by Ed Law

I enjoyed the discussion with others on this topic but this is probably my last post on this subject. The reason is I have changed my position on this. I no longer think we should use strength in the algorithm. I was reminded that any rules no matter how well it was intended can have undesirable consequences. Think about the ranking points rule of 2010 that leads to 6 vs 0. If teams know that strength is being considered in the algorithm, the strong teams may start sandbagging during the season in hope of coming out stronger than their statistics show in the post season. This will destroy the game.
The only effect a tough schedule has on a team is they may not be alliance captains because they don't get enough wins. However if the team is indeed good, the OPR numbers and scouts will recognize that. Even if they rank low, they can still be number one pick. So it is not as bad as it seems.

So overall, I'll concede that random selection isn't perfect, but I'm not totally convinced a team strength based algorithm is better.