White Paper Discuss: Karthik's Championship Event Data

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by 10intheCrunch

I'm still kind of confused by the metric. Team 254 has 105+ in Sacramento, but just over 80 in San Jose, even though by the statistics we improved between the regionals (higher mean, lower SD, higher rel ave., higher factor). Is being 2nd seed (in SJ) instead of first (in Sac) or not winning a robot award what causes that?

It was the lack of a technical award which hurt the Poofs in San Jose. From my experiences, I've found that more often than not, the technical awards are great predictors of success. I've always very happy with the decisions made by the judges. This is why they factor so highly in my metric.

I was shocked when I discovered that the Poofs didn't win an award in San Jose. It almost made me reconsider the equation. (I figured the Poofs would end up at number 1, just because they're the best robot I've seen.) After further thought, I just figured this lack of an award was an annomaly.

Does anyone have any insight as to why the Poofs didn't win an award?

If you're interested, lower the values for the awards on the master metric sheet, and see what happens. I played with various values, and the median I came up with seemed the most reasonable. I'd love to hear some suggestions.