Change Of Match Schedule

[ChrisH]

I can think of several reasons a change might have been made:

1) Incorrect data, ie they input the wrong lunch time or some other important time. It is amazing how much emphasis the match generation system puts on lunch.

2) Somebody changed the number of matches to be played. ie the FTA put in 9 and somebody later said "are you crazy? and made them change it to 8.

3) They issued it without auditing it and then found too many repeats when people started looking at it. There are inputs you can make that will either increase or decrease the number of repeat opponenets teams will see.

4) The schedule was leaked early to a team or individual.

The list could go on .....

In Los Angeles we had to reschedule because a team decided (on Thursday ) that they weren't going to participate. In San Diego we were trying to start a team as late as possible because their robot was shipped to the wrong place and hadn't arrived yet. ( They were originally in Match 1, we got them back to Match 7 and their robot arrived about the time we opened up the pits for the day) Fortunately in both cases we hadn't distributed the lists yet.

While as FTA I didn't touch the scoring system physically, I sure was looking over shoulders when the matches were being generated. FTAs are trained to operate the scoring system, including the match generation part, sometimes we just "have more important things to do". There are also many good reasons to let the scoring guy handle it, but I could do it if needed.

I made darn sure I was there when we audited the schedule that had been generated before printing. Auditing is a key step that is easily missed as the system doesn't make you do it. With proper auditing you could almost get a decent schedule out of last year's algorithm. You just had to run it a bunch of times.