What happened in Curie???

[Mike Schreiber]

(1) 346 (36) 1771 (48) 1747
(2) 1806 (44) 668 (37) 2039
(3) 175 (34) 254 (49) 2185
(4) 399 (9) 188 (63) 329
(5) 375 (47) 1622 (50) 190
(6) 816 (29) 245 (30) 341
(7) 217 (51) 68 (61) 247
(8) 27 (68) 79 (45) 70

I didn't watch selection, but I got the list afterwards. I know for a fact that the lowest seed that was selected (79 was the 68th seed) was an awesome part of our alliance and I know we wouldn't have been able to get to the SFs without them. I'm frustrated with the seeding system because teams that perform so well get destroyed because of their partners or get a really rough match schedule. The solution more matches, less teams...will it happen? Probably not.

[LCLARK_175]

Originally Posted by martin417

Perhaps you didn't read my post completely. I wasn't talking about championships. The incident in question was at a regional this year.

Then I apologize for the misunderstanding.

[Ed Law]

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

Our division had only 14 teams with a positive "plus/minus". Plus/minus (for our team) is the number of points scored by the robot minus the number of points in the robot's trailer. This year it is the biggest indicator of a team's contribution. Obviously, for pure defensive bots we only look at points scored in their trailer as +/- will, by definition, always be negative.

Paul,

Thanks for explaining your scouting and selection philosophy and posting your scouting data and selection list on the other post. It helps us understand how good teams select their partners.

I must say that I am very surprised you do not take into account how many moon rocks the human players attempted and scored. According to Team 188's scouting database, your human player do not attempt to score very often because your strategy is to have the human player feeds moon rocks into your robot. However we can not say that for other teams. Using your data in the raw data sheet, if you sum column F which is Moon rock scored by robots in all the matches you get 2354. And if you sum column J which is Moon rock in trailer you get 5080. This shows that only 46% of the moon rocks are scored by robots.

If we look at Team 188's database, the human player percentage ranges from 21% to 77% with a mean of about 47 and standard deviation of about 10. Since human players scored 54% of the moon rocks, picking a team that has a 60% shooter rather than a 30% shooter in a 100 point game would mean a difference of 16 points, which is quite significant. In past years the role of human player to scoring is limited. I don't know what percentage the human player should contribute to the score in an ideal game. I feel that this year their contribution to the final score is on the high side and thus scouting data should not ignore them. Another observation I have is robots can be defended but you can not defend against a good human player. They just keep putting moon rocks into trailers.

Ed

[J Flex 188]

Wouldn't defending against a good human player simply be moving my robot to the side of the field that they weren't able to reach, if that was my concern?

I would be more afraid of a highly mobile, highly effective robot like 217 unleashing a stream of moon rocks anywhere on the field into my trailer than I would be of a good human player taking a low percentage shot halfway across it.

Originally Posted by Ed Law

Another observation I have is robots can be defended but you can not defend against a good human player. They just keep putting moon rocks into trailers.

Ed

[Paul Copioli]

Ed,

You make a good point, but for our team and our strategy we intended to starve the field of rocks. When a human player was on our alliance, the first thing they were told was to not shoot the moon rocks unless the trailer was stopped generally in front of them.

We prioritized on a high capacity dumper that could human load from the top and could human load in auton. Combined with our human loading in auton, we could keep many of our balls off of the floor and "starve" the field. In essence, almost every ball we were pciking up from the floor was not ours.

There were many ways to wn this year, but this strategy worked for us.

[MattB703]

I think that you will notice that the Championship winning alliance used this same strategy. It was also used very succesfully in the Michigan Championship eliminations.

[Lil' Lavery]

That strategy also worked very well basically everywhere it was used (so long as robots were capable of being loaded from the human players, either through the airlock or over the wall). In general, the accuracy of a top-tier scoring machine was higher than 99% of human players, resulting in far fewer balls ended up on the floor if robots were used as the primary scoring method.

[ScottOliveira]

Originally Posted by Ed Law

Paul,

Thanks for explaining your scouting and selection philosophy and posting your scouting data and selection list on the other post. It helps us understand how good teams select their partners.

I must say that I am very surprised you do not take into account how many moon rocks the human players attempted and scored. According to Team 188's scouting database, your human player do not attempt to score very often because your strategy is to have the human player feeds moon rocks into your robot. However we can not say that for other teams. Using your data in the raw data sheet, if you sum column F which is Moon rock scored by robots in all the matches you get 2354. And if you sum column J which is Moon rock in trailer you get 5080. This shows that only 46% of the moon rocks are scored by robots.

If we look at Team 188's database, the human player percentage ranges from 21% to 77% with a mean of about 47 and standard deviation of about 10. Since human players scored 54% of the moon rocks, picking a team that has a 60% shooter rather than a 30% shooter in a 100 point game would mean a difference of 16 points, which is quite significant. In past years the role of human player to scoring is limited. I don't know what percentage the human player should contribute to the score in an ideal game. I feel that this year their contribution to the final score is on the high side and thus scouting data should not ignore them. Another observation I have is robots can be defended but you can not defend against a good human player. They just keep putting moon rocks into trailers.

Ed

I would have to agree that this year the human player just had too much of a contribution to scoring. FIRST is meant to be a robotics competition, and when only half, or less than half, of the scoring is done by robots, it seems to be deviating from the purpose of the game.

I also feel autonomous mode was very undervalued this year, with the only thing to do in autonomous mode really being to try to get away from a human player! Towards the end of championship, we got autonomous scoring working, but thinking back on it, it may not have been as useful, although it was impressive. Since most teams drive towards their human players, following one in order to shoot on it puts us in range of their human, who has 13 moon rocks to our 7.

It would be nice to see more of an emphasis put on getting things done in autonomous mode (think about last year with the bonus points for running laps, or the year before with the keepers that guarantee you a spot on the rack).

It would also be nice to have something done about no-show and nonfunctional robots. Of course there is no simple solution. Personally, I would like any robot that doesn't show to get a loss, regardless of how the alliance performs. The argument against this is that it encourages teams to put an inoperable bot on the field, or rush repairs too much. However, this could be fixed by having a team who's robot doesn't work at any point in the match to receive a loss also. This might seem harsh, but it goes back to the real world, where you don't get paid for a product that doesn't work.

I would also point out that while this might seem to hurt rookie teams in particular, it is often easy for rookie teams, or any team, to get help while at competition. From the example Martin gave about the team at a regional who was seeded first with 4 no-shows, Sean and myself spent a while working on their drive train until they functioned (and we didn't finish until AFTER the match we played with them, for the match we played against them). I also always go to future alliance partners, and do whatever I can to make sure they work, if there is some sort of problem.