ball counter

[Jack Jones]

Originally Posted by Master Dictator

I have to tell you this is a horrible way to go. I am not complaining but I feel that it is too hard for judges to count so fast. I am with team 528 and at the Philly Regional twice it happened once in finals that the judges were way off.

One match we played our allinace scored 93 points because we had 2 dumpers and 1 shooter. Us and another team, I think 303 were putting in 30 at a time. The counter say 94 and the judges amitted that the balls were coming in so fast they could not count so they made a number up.. happened to be 20 since the 2 corner bots were both empty. We lost by 10 then and since there are no replays they still watched the video and found out we really did score 93 but did not change anything. Oh well. History is history can't change it.

But on this note I feel it really is too hard for judges to count the balls comming in

So, you watched a video and were able to count every ball that went in, but the six people who were a few feet away were not.

You think the other team was #303, but you know you were putting in 30 at a time.

The counter say -- Which counter? -- If you mean the RTS on the big screen, then I've seen it show impossible numbers!

What are we to believe? The RTS, the human counters, or innuendo and hearsay?

My son and I volunteered at GLR, MWR, Milwaukee, and LVR. He was scorekeeper and I was a referee. We agree that it was hard for the human counters to count every ball. We are pretty sure mistakes were made - people make mistakes. However, those mistakes were minor compared to the ones the RTS was making over and over again.

At MRW we had trainees and their instructors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Center counting balls. I will guarantee that they were 99.44 percent accurate - or better. I've been on many visual perception field tests where both GIs and civilians had to spot "items of interest." The GI's measured performance was astounding, but not surprising since they're trained to know that their buddies lives depend on them.

At the regionals we refs closely monitored the human counters. Every time there was a situation, such as a shot after the light went out, or while the light was out, or mass quantities went in, I went to them to see if they got it right. Only once was one of them mistaken; and that was on a bounce out from the center goal that got counted, which we corrected.

We took statistics at all four regionals, which showed that the RTS and human count disagreed as to both the autonomous and overall winner anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3 of the time. At the same time we saw scores from the RTS in the hundreds and thousands (RED - 31,831 in Las Vegas). So, while we agree that it's hard for the humans to do an accurate count, it was impossible for the RTS as designed and implemented.

History is not necessarily "history." It depends on who's telling the story.