"Random" match Schedules

[eugenebrooks]

I am going to have to be blunt about this. This must be fixed. Teams that work hard to field a robot and come to a competition will not accept this sort of scheduling, and should not. There are many highly skilled mentors involved in the FIRST program who understand random scheduling, while satisfying constraints, and who would happily turn out validated scheduling software for FIRST to use. Yes, I know that it is a hard problem, but it is a solvable one. The match scheduling should be based only on the index of the teams, (1-N) for the teams at the regional, should be random while satisfying the needed constraints on the schedule and should be blind to the team numbers. The index schedule for a given value of "N teams" at a regional need never change, only the task of randomly matching teams to the indicies needs to be done at the regional.

Originally Posted by Keith Watson

I recommend that someone write a short program which takes a look at the ranking after the "seeding rounds" take place. Look at the top 10 teams, see if they had repeat opponents, and note the final rank of those opponents.

Remember that rankings are very important to how alliances are chosen for the final rounds.

Does the data show a pattern?

I did this check by hand for the PNW Regional. (So my count may be slightly off.) There were 54 competitors.

Rank 1
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 54

Rank 2
- faced the same competitor 4 times who finished with a rank of 32
- faced the same competitor 4 times who finished with a rank of 43

Rank 3
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 52

Rank 4
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 50

Rank 5
- faced the same competitor 4 times who finished with a rank of 18
- faced the same competitor 4 times who finished with a rank of 44

Rank 6
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 51

Rank 7
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 45

Rank 8
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 46

Rank 9
- faced the same competitor 4 times who finished with a rank of 53
- faced the same competitor 4 times who finished with a rank of 33
- faced the same competitor 2 times who finished with a rank of 35
- faced the same competitor 2 times who finished with a rank of 49

Rank 10
- faced the same competitor 8 times who finished with a rank of 48

The PNW Regional data shows a pattern. Not to take away from every team who performed well, but is this really the "intended" outcome? Note that the rules clearly state the schedule cannot be changed after it is published.