"Random" pairings

[Ken Delaney]

When we competed at the Lone Star regional we were never with the same team twice.Our team just finished compteting in the Philadelphia Alliance Regional and I found it odd that we were paried with one team twice and another team three times.

I understand the "randomess" of assignments is to make the competition fair, but this situation should not happen. If multiple pairings happen then all the teams suffer. Either a team could get a competetive advantage if the team they keep getting paired with is really good. It could be a disadvantage if the team they keep getting paired with is not functioning or inexperienced.

I don't want to sound like I am whining, it just difficult to understand the difference between the way the regionals are run. I know it is difficult to do the scheduling, especially since teams need enough time bewteen matches to recover.

I use a random feature to generate seating charts for my classes, but I then make small changes to ensure that students have moved or are not sitting next to the same people all the time. Why can't FIRST do the same thing.

Ken Delaney
Coach Team 357

[Mike Norton]

FIRST has been doing this for a long time. you would think they would get it right.

They have all year to set up the pairings. They know a rang of robots that will be competiting so why don't they get it right.
Who knows.


this happen to us for the past three year and they keep saying it is the program its the program. Well it is time for a new program!

[Perseus]

i dont find much wrong with the way FIRST pairs. I think that if you were paired with the same team three times, it was their fault but i havent witnessed too much of that.

i don't aggree with FIRST allowing ranked teams to pick other ranked teams. The reason for rankings is to seperate the best and that whole philosophy means nothing if they can pick each other

[Christine G.]

This year at KSC we were paired with 2 teams twice. When questioned why this happen they said it was the randomization program. They then stated that the only way they could fix the problem was to re-generate the entire listing and redistribute it to all the teams and they were not going to do that!

Next, I asked nicely if they could just switch a red and blue team to resolve the problem and they sent me to go talk to another person. I went to talk to this person and he asked me to mark up a pairings sheet that I needed to get from the first person I was talking to. I went back to the first person and she would not give me a pairing sheet (apparently they were treating these sheets as if they were gold and would only give one per team) she then walked the sheet over to the guy, gave him a hard time about even wanting it, and finally handed it to me to mark up. After all that NOTHING was done to resolve the problem. The only thing I found was that the lady I dealt with from FIRST was rude and unhelpful. Maybe she was just having a bad day

[Nate Smith]

Having run the scoring system at one event, with two more to come, I can say that due to the nature of the system, it is next to impossible to change an individual match's pairings. I do know that they are working on a better pairing algorithim to use, but it is taking some time to develop and test, to make sure it does not cause any new problems while still solving what they're trying to correct.

[Carolyn Duncan]

What about pairings that put the vetern teams together with no rookies and visa versa? I seem to remember this from VCU. The teams were very segrated which was a shame because the rookies missed out on great opportunities to play with the veterans, and many rookies may have had a better chance of getting picked for finals (some really deserved to get picked but were unknown by the higher ranking teams from lack of partnership!) Maybe someone else can elaborate more on noticing this problem...