Championship Event - Where the "Random" Match Sorting Really "Shines"

[The Lucas]

Originally Posted by Travis Hoffman

That veteran list is packed with a much higher quantity of successful 2007 teams relative to the other 2 lists, so if this division were actually finalized, "relatively inexperienced" teams like 365, 469, 1114, 1305 should be ecstatic to reap the bountiful harvest of favorable qualifying round matchups coming their way.

We (365) have been at the first team in the M pool at every regional this year. I looked into it after FLR and I knew a week in advance going into Philly. I think this "Team Number Fairness" algorithm is most unfair. I probably was the most vocal critic of the algorithm at Philly (I talked the scorekeeper's ear off and told pretty much anyone else who would listen). I noted the partner repetition, cycle (some teams got only 1 match off between matches), and the unfair advantage received by teams (like mine) simply based on their team number (not even years of experience). In another odd twist of the algorithm, the first teams in every pool seem to always have the first match generally again the second team in every pool. Is this meant to showcase the "algorithm determined Best teams". At Philly, the first cycle of the Match List literally went:

first in every pool vs second in every pool
third vs fourth
5th vs 6th
etc... for basically the WHOLE first cycle, so it didn't even try to "randomize" the first cycle

However your list is slightly wrong. The V pool is the last to fill up so 357 is currently at the top of the M pool. I know this because this is the only reason 365 was always in the M pool. If one team hadn't dropped out (tragic story I don't want to share w/o their permission) from Philly we would have had 45 teams (equally divisible by 3) and 365 would be at the end of the V pool. Same thing at FLR if it had 36 teams instead of 35 assuming the 36th team had # > 365.

I know FIRST probably will not fix this by Championship, but I hope they will by next year. I suggest pregenerating optimized random matrices (ie check all combinations) with constraints for cycle time for every combination of number of teams at a regional and reasonable number of matches. Then randomize the team list to matrix spots and drop them in the corresponding spots in the matrix.