White Paper Discuss: Karthik's Championship Event Data

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by ThirdRide

Explain this to me:

My team was the third team in our alliance and we won our regional. How come our partners get a bigger bonus than us. We helped win the regional too and I think we deserve an equal share. We should at least get a bigger bonus that the finalists, or any of the other awards. That's just not fair.

When creating any sort of statistic, the goal is to be able to make mass generalizations, and be correct most of the time. Stats will never be able to tell the whole story. In some regionals the third robot on a championship alliance is absolutely crucial (See team 229 at the Long Island Regional). In many other cases the role of the third robot is diminished. In my experiences, I've found the third robot not to be as strong as the first or second finalist robot. Hence, the statistic was created reflecting this.

No statistic is perfect. I'm sure there will be a few teams at Nationals who do poorly in my rankings who will do well at the event.

The reason I like this statistic, is it rewards robots who put up good numbers (High Averages) and it rewards robots that might not be strong numerically but people still recognize them as good robots (Awards).

Technical Awards are interesting in that a team cannot win two from the same regional in one year.

This is not actually true. If you scan through my spreadsheet, you'll see a few ocassions of teams winning two technical awards at one event. Just taking a quick glance, Team 456 won both the Delphi and GM award in Texas. I know there are more occurrences than this.

The spreading out of awards at an event usually depends on the judges at the event.