Veteran Teams have No Advantage

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by Bongle

I did this last year. I found that older teams DID have an advantage in terms of scoring, if not seeding. This was based on all the week 1 and week 2 regionals in 2006.

That is very interesting data and analysis, and suggests that perhaps there is a slight advantage to be gained from experience (which one might well expect) but certainly not an insurmountable one. It also meshes well with the idea that -- particularly for a student centred team -- there is an upper limit to how much experience one can gain. Does it make sense that a ten-year team would have any advantage over a four-year team?

I think that changes to the KOP and the availability of COTS mechanisms have also greatly helped rookies and evened up opportunities. A two-speed gearbox or mecanum wheel four years ago was something that required a lot of technical expertise.... now it requires a credit card and some bolts. Which isn't a bad thing, but it does level the playing field.

Mentoring and support also helps balance the playing field. I know our rookie neighbours (2273, who did quite well and placed 20 spots ahead of us in Portland) are using a couple of our old motors and speed controllers in their system because they didn't have the inventory of spare parts on hand that we do. Their neighbours in the pits, team 114, not only loaned them a robot cart at first, but then built them one! (One of the many reasons 114 took home the J&J Sportsmanship award... well done, #114!) One of the great things about FIRST is that veterans help rookies, rather than pummel them.

So I look at this as follows... either:

1) Veteran teams have NO inherent advantage in terms of winning qualifying matches. The data posted on scoring from last year, however, suggests that this might not be the case.

2) The current scheduling system eliminates any advantage gained by experience by repeatedly pitting veteran teams against each other rather than by having them compete against a random selection of opponents. Assuming that this scheduling system is new this year, this would explain why last year veteran teams scored higher, but this year had not advantage in qualifying matches. (Yes, two slightly different measurments, but the best we've got right now.)

In any case I understand that FIRST is considering an adjustment to the match scheduling system. If they choose to eliminate the rookies vs. rookies and veterans vs. veterans part of the formula we can re-run the qualifying results from next weekend and see if there is more of a correlation between team number and seeding.

I think that would be really interesting to look at...

Jason

P.S. What a great idea to assign this as a stats project to an AP stats class... I might save this as an assignment for some of my math classes, too.