Coaches keeping track of score

[Tytus Gerrish]

Practice practice practice. i know through my experience coaching. you need your eyes all over the field all the time. Im taking the full time role as coach this year with 1889. i already have that whole field burned into my brain. taking your eyes off that field for half a second to mark down where those donughts are or to look down to see what you've written could be the end of you.

not to mention my handwriting sucks anyways

[Daniel Brim]

Whatever happened to real time scoring? With this game it will probably be simple enough that it should be fine for keeping track of rows and points.

[Pavan Dave]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I was thinking about a pocket PC strategy computer. At the very least, it could point out places where you should be blcoking incipient super rows from the other alliance. I know everyone's convinced this could be a super high scoring game, but I think a good tactician is going to be blocking the super rows atleast as often as building super rows of her own. I suspect the really high scores will mostly come against weak opponents. No one's mentioned this yet, but defensive robots aren't just keeping opponents from building up rows, they're protecting the rows you're building up from being cut short by a well played opposing ringer. Your tactician(s) are going to have their hands full directing traffic and efficient coordination between teams is going to be key to success.

Also, I dispute that the middle row has any more importance than the other rows. Spoilling a vertical row of three from the bottom turns 8 points to 4 points just the same as spoilling from the middle or top. As such, I suspect the top row will be most important simply because there will be less teams than can place that high.

Similarly me and my mentor were considering a project for my ISM course and one of the possibilities was to create a touchscreen little dealio with the rack and it would highlight your 3 best scoring options and it would give you 3 places you want to place a spoiler. We only got to the brainstorming but right now that wouldn't be that of an idea since in the Q&A they said that it was okay if one of the drivers was using it.

The software displaying the status of the dashboard information may also display the state of the field, and any estimated score. A laptop connected to the Dashboard Port of the Operator Interface would be considered part of the Operator Console. As such, the Coach may not touch the dashboard laptop without violating Rule <G49>.
Reply With Quote

Located Here

Pavan.

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by Tytus Gerrish

Practice practice practice. i know through my experience coaching. you need your eyes all over the field all the time. Im taking the full time role as coach this year with 1889. i already have that whole field burned into my brain. taking your eyes off that field for half a second to mark down where those donughts are or to look down to see what you've written could be the end of you.

not to mention my handwriting sucks anyways

I agree 100% tytus...I don't think its a great idea for a coach to be attempting to "keep score" during the match. It doesn't make sense. You just have to practice, stare at the field and get a feel for the game. If you do take your eyes off the field for a split second, something could change and your entire scoring process to that time is screwed up. You don't need to know your score, you need to know how to increase your score and thats easily done with your eyes and some good old common sense.

[dfukuba]

Our team had posted on the Q&A board about bringing laptops on the field for coaches to use, but as stated earlier. To comply with the rules, the laptop must me connected to the OI, and only the drivers can touch it.

I would think that your coach should be very aware of what is going on, and try to figure out where the best place to score is, without using any kind of Aid. It will be pretty had to write things down on the board and such, when robots are flying around and tubes are rolling everywhere.

IMHO

--Dan

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Daniel Brim

Whatever happened to real time scoring? With this game it will probably be simple enough that it should be fine for keeping track of rows and points.

Hah. Did you think that in '05 as well? Don't count on it. (remembering '05, when the "real-time" scoring was late and/or inaccurate until the end of the round)

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by EricH

Hah. Did you think that in '05 as well? Don't count on it. (remembering '05, when the "real-time" scoring was late and/or inaccurate until the end of the round)

As one of the real-time scorekeepers of that year (Curie field), I've got to say that we had a heck of a job on our hands. We had these handheld PDAs running some Hatch software that absolutely could not get disconnected from the network or turned off (lest you have to call them over to get it reset and working right). We had to count tetras on top and bottom of up to five goals (one did their home row, the middle row nearest the audience, and the center goal; the other volunteer did the other home row and the middle row goal nearest the scoring table), and track ownership. Basically, we had two people to do a three-person job.

However, that was with a Hatch-designed RTS system. I have high hopes for this year's system being more user-friendly.

Back to the topic at hand, I don't intend to send any drive team onto the field with more than a note card for reference (run this autonomous mode, block this guy, etc.). Assuming he or she can track the approximate length of their dominant rows and the opponent's dominant rows, a good coach stands to figure out what needs to happen next.

[Priyadarshy]

Originally Posted by b_mallerd

Neone know some awsome connect four players?

the strategy in connect four is to go for the center and in connect four the game piece falls to the bottom and in rack and roll any column can be considered the center so i guess the strategy might have only a few similarities to connect four

[Scion13]

I agree that the coaches this year won't necessarily have to know the exact score (which would be very difficult without some kind of device). All we have to do is know how many rows both alliances have and use common sense to figure out where to score to get the most points

[Bongle]

Hmmm... making a 3D coach-practice thing could be a fun little project for my graphics course, or really good practice for anyone.

Just make a game that shows a board layout (in 3D obviously or else the rack-reading skills won't transfer to real life), and has the coach type in the score of the rack. Have it as a goal to improve day over day.

Something like this:
-rack is displayed
-coach must type in current score, best spoiler-placement location and best ringer-placement location.

At first it could just be single-layer ringers, but afterwards you could add invalid rows (double-red or double-blue), spoilered rows, rows that have invalid spoilers (spoiler on top of red and blue or spoiler on a keeper). Being able to judge that on the fly would be a decent skill to have.

Edit: Actually, even in 2D it would be useful to get the principles of board-reading done. Maybe I'll toss it together tonight after I do some graphics homework.

[Scion13]

Figuring out the exact score will be hard, but ringer and spoiler placement would be useful

[lurburlnxc]

I have edited a program that can find the best location on the board and taper down to the worst location. It is based off Excel and you can download the original program here http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1907? . I have edited the program but i have a problem finishing this set of code in VB.
>>Public Function Change()
>> If newHigh = newHigh2 Then
>> cell.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'It says the error is here
>> cell2.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'And it could be here
>> If newHigh = newHigh3 Then
>> cell3.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'And here
>> If newHigh = newHigh4 Then cell4.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'and here
>> End If
>> Else
>> cell.Interior.ColorIndex = 4 'and finally here
>> End If
>>End Function
Every time the program gets to this part of the code it gives a runtime error of '424'. I've defined the ranges and specified a variable with a type 'Range' which are called 'cell' 'cell2' etc. You get the point. If anyone can help me figure this out it would be greatly appriciated. I just started to learn VB like a week ago. I know Java, some C and C#, QBasic, TI-Basic (the graphing calculator language), and was going to try and teach myself HTML to create a proxy (just for fun). That's my experience. Hope you guys can help me out.

[POLISH703]

Originally Posted by robotcanuck1676

Here's an interesting thought regarding the tactician: In theory, all the coach would have to do is monitor the opposing color, because it can be assumed, especially at the end of the match, that if the opposing alliance doesn't have it, you have it. Maybe coordinate coaches so that one is watching the opposing, the other is watching your alliance. One says where to put your rings, the other says where to defend/put spoilers. The other coach and a human player could be relaying this information- there's only two slots for tubes to go through, which at max will use 2 HPs. Just a thought...

Well there is only 2 slots for human players to use, but I do believe it is legal to load ringers over the top of the alliance wall to pass off onto robots.

To me it seems like the coaches this year will really have to work together to make things be a success in the matches. For instance have one coach be the captain of that Alliance and then have the other two coaches keep track of the red and blue ringers will the captain coordinates the placement of spoilers. Also rather then have the coach direct his/her own team it may have to be were that person will instruct other teams as well. And of course the alliance will probaly benefit from a team pre-game session on what the plan is going to be.