Idea to Balance Championship Divisions

[Ty Tremblay]

Originally Posted by Knufire

I just wanted to interject, do we know for certain this is true? I think it's been a long-time assumption that assignment of a Championship division is pseudo-random, but I don't think we know that for certain. I sort of remember Frank going through how they assign rookies to make sure that there's an equal amount in each division, but I haven't heard anything else other than conjecture about team sorting.

There's plenty of statistical analysis to show how unbalanced the divisions were this past year. However, without knowledge of the algorithm used to generate the divisions, we don't know if it was just random chance or a problem with the algorithm itself (or if competitive balance was even a factor within the algorithm in the first place).

http://www.firstinspires.org/robotic...atch-Schedules

Wondering how we assigned teams to FIRST Championship Divisions this year? First, we assigned Rookies, taking all Rookies signed up for Championship and putting them team by team sequentially in Divisions - one team in Division 1, one team in Division 2, one team in Division 3, one team in Division 4, then back to Division 1 again - in the order in which they registered for CMP, until we ran out of Rookies. This made sure no Division was over- or under-weighted with these least experienced of all FRC teams. Then, we took the Veterans and did the same thing. That’s it.