Long post - this year's game was tough - here's why:

[archiver]

Posted by Alan Federman at 04/11/2001 6:36 PM EST


Engineer on team #255, Odyssey, from Foothill HS, San Jose and NASA.



I've spent some time analysing the results and match standings and here is why I think this year's game was tough. Let's look at the rookies. I don't have an exact count of how many rookie teams were at the Nationals I am guessing about 70. The highest ranked rookie was #713 ranked 11th in Newton with 247 points. The following rookie played in divisional matches:

546 ranked 18th in Galileo
538 ranked 39th in Archimedes
710 ranked 44th and 573 ranked 67th in Curie
There were no rookies in the division finals at Newton
There were no rookies in any of the division championship alliances.

So while rookies were about 20% of the field, they were only 5% of the elimination rounds.

I think that this was a tough year for 1st and 2nd year teams too. Most of the winning alliances were seeded with the oldest, most experienced teams.

If you look at the teams seeded 9-12 only 6 out of these 16 'top' performers were selected for alliances.
Hard to tell team #11 ranked 9th with 293.43 qualifying points isn't good enough to be in the finals while #126 with 293.86 qualifying points is (No dis to 126 - a great team).

So here are some non-statistical conclusions - it isn't
that the top teams 71, 60, 254, 192, 75, 175, 171, the Delphi's - have more experience, they have more resources. These teams all participated in more than one regional. Some of them have full or near full size practice fields with bridge and goals built to exact specifications. In some cases they can build a duplicate
practice robot so that they have hundreds of hours of practice comming into events. At the very least they have last year's robot to work from.

The stated goal of this year's game was that 2 good robots could overcome 1 super robot. I don't think this
was achieved, and I feel the bar for rookies was terribly high.

So I guess I'd like to see a game more like '99 and '00.
I didn't think the level of smashing and bashing was particularly high. There are many ways to make a competition more like a race and less like a fight, have
specialized and general robots and still have the rookies compete so that scoring and not destruction is rewarded.