"Random" match Schedules

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

... Obviously the miscommunication occurred at a fundamental level.

Alan's conclusion matches what we (FTA, Lead Scorekeeper, and event staff in St. Louis) were told on Thursday night when we contacted FIRST to ask why the "perpetual opponent" schedule kept coming up no matter what we tried to change it.

Dave has told us this will be fixed for Week 2. That's good enough for me.

[Ben Piecuch]

Well, I started this whole thread... Now that we all have the answer we were looking for, maybe I can nudge this in a different direction.

(Moderators, please let me know if I should make this a new thread...)

If teams were constantly playing with/against the same alliances, how come the rankings stayed at it's typical distribution? Why didn't every team either go 8-0 or 0-8? Did this have to do with alliances switching up the strategy? Was it due to mechanical/electrical problems or improvements? Driver practice and improvement over the course of the regional?

I'm looking for specific answers from only the teams and drive/strategy teams that competed last weekend. If you don't have first hand knowledge of strategy sessions, driver improvements, or robot problems/improvements, please don't add what you "think" happened. (Sorry to be so blunt about this...)

Thanks,

BEN

[Michael Corsetto]

Well, the whole alliance was never the same, just one team over and over again. So if one team was dominant over their "continual partner", they tended to end up on the opposite sides of the rankings, but this wasn't an assurance that the same thing would happen every match. In our case, we went 5-2-1 vs 192, and a lot of how the matches played out had to do with our alliance partners, not just 114 vs 192 battling it out solo on the field. So I think in a way FIRST got a little lucky that the matches weren't so lopsided, but I do feel really bad for the teams that played against the same dominant team every match. I would freak out if I knew we had to play someone like the Poofs every qualifier

I'm glad that FIRST realizes the issue and I hope we will see significant improvements in the weeks to come.

Mike C.

[Fred Sayre]

Team 488 played against team 492 every match from the beginning of thursday to the end of qualifiers on Saturday. We ended up winning most of our matches, but not all because sure enough, two robots do not decide the outcome of a 3v3 match. Not only that, but if a team gets the opportunity to play against the same alliance every single match they will be forced to come up with some unique and creative strategies to change the outcome.

We lost a match due to the (at the time) brand new tactic of deploying a ramp in the alley beside the rack to completely prevent us from getting back to our home zone to deploy and lift. This definitely caught us off guard. After this strategy started popping up and with how powerful lifting points became more and more teams started playing heavy defense. This is what lead to our two low points ties at the end of qualifiers and having both 1540 and 948 (two of the best pnw ringers) both play defense against us nearly the entire time during two of our elimination matches.

[Luckyfish05]

Originally Posted by Richard

Dave has told us this will be fixed for Week 2. That's good enough for me.

Here, here! Again as many people have said, THANK YOU DAVE FOR THE CLARIFICATION OF WHAT'S GOING ON! And I'm just happy it'll be fixed!

[Akash Rastogi]

Well, our team has been tracking this and other threads like it for a while now. We'll just have to wait and see what comes up at the NY Regional. Hope to see some of you there.

[cziggy343]

one of our mentors was a volunteer (he was the announcer) at the vcu regional. he said there was a glich in the program. they were trying to pair a veteran team with a middle team with a rookie team. they messed up somewhere in the middle. and at the crossover point of the verteran/middle teams, they were paired together in every match.

[ALIBI]

Looks like the event staff will be able to use one of two different algorithms to set matches up. One is the perpetual opponent and the other the random opponent. See this post in the Q and A.

http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=6163

For further details. A big thank you to FIRST for giving us a choice! Hopefully your individual event staffers will use random.

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by ALIBI

Looks like the event staff will be able to use one of two different algorithms to set matches up. One is called the perpetual opponent and the other the random opponent. See this post in the Q and A.

http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=6163

For further details. A big thank you to FIRST for giving us a choice! Hopefully your individual event staffers will use random.

Thank you FIRST!

Now if only we can strike a truce over the band saw and drill press fiasco, I will be completely relieved.

[Richard Wallace]

Looks like Pittsburgh successfully chose the "random" match generation mode, rather than "perpetual opponent".

Looking at two "senior" teams 48 and 49 and their "senior" opponents in matches so far: (as of about noon Eastern time)

48: 49, 158, 395, 291

49: 48, 117, 247, 123

[BiTurboS4]

This coming week should go off without a hitch, they will be implimenting an entirely new algorithm. Evidently the current one was written to such constraints that with any drastic modification it could break other things in the process. If this is all people have to point out about the first week of regionals, then I believe we're in best shape to start a season in almost 4 or 5 years. The only other issue that I noticed at the event that I attended was that the iPaq's that were used for automated scoring had a tendency to either drop their network connection or IIS would need to be restarted. The whole process took a round or two to get fixed, but was seemless to the audience.

[d.courtney]

These results are no different then the findings I had from Waterloo last year, mind you Waterloo is a very small regional, making it harder to mix up teams while still giving them a good enough break in between matches (was the reason given when I approached the issue). After approaching FIRST about this at a debriefing, I had the chance to see the code they used for Waterloo, it was in fact very well written. There was however a problem, this was that this program didn't "reset" the algorithm after breaks such as the end of day or lunches causing teams to almost stay in a loop of teams they play with every match introducing one team into those they last played with as it ranked having a longer break for the team more important then who they were playing against. I changed this in that code adding a set number of resets, and saw a far more "random" selection between the days, and even better adding 2 more breaks. These two extra breaks are very accomplishable, if FIRST was to say add two 10 min breaks in the day one before and one after lunch, these breaks would also be logical as to allow the volunteers a much needed short break, allow any syncing problems with scoring to be worked out, and a multitude of other practical reasons. I relayed back my solution to the one that made the software, hoping these minor changes could be made.

It could very well be that this "looping" effect where you see teams play with or against others many times, is simply because they don't have resets for the algorithm, or it could be because the algorithm was poorly designed, either way it is a problem FIRST knows about and I find it unfortunate for those teams who have been effected that they haven't solved it yet.

edit: mind you there never was a problem with teams playing against a team all the time... say if they were stuck in the "loop" with said team, a few would be with a few against

[Akash Rastogi]

this is absolutely true of the scheduling. the so called randomizing is making the strong stronger and keeping the weak at that same level of performance. This is not helping gathering any significant data during scouting eith er. What are they going to do about this???

[geeknerd99]

Well, it certainly makes scouting a little bit easier for every match.

401 plays against 405 EVERY SINGLE ROUND!!!! Strangely enough, I'm not really noticing this when I drive though. Then again, we're playing mostly defense right now.

[ggoldman]

Every team in the pits is paired against the team directly next to them (not across the isle).

It is very ironic, because when 401 first got there, we helped repair what turned out to be our perpetual opponent.

I am glad that we could help out their team, but would appreciate more variation in the matching.

A little birdie from the higher ups told me they are working to fix it for the other regionals.