2010 5th Gear FRC Match Simulator

[gblake]

Folks,

This is a duplicate of a post I just put into a couple of threads about scouting - If you already saw the other one, you can skip this one.

I'm curious if anyone has tried using the 5th Gear Simulator as a way to test drive their scouting metrics or their scouting recording keeping tools/methods, or their scouts (the humans)?

Imagine this:

• Install 5th Gear on enough computers for 6-player matches.
• Have 12 of your team members pick a simulated robot and stick with that choice.
• Run the 12 players through several 3 vs 3 qualifying matches while the scouts use your team's scouting tools/metrics.
• At the end of the quals see if you have successfully identified the best player-plus-simulated-robot combinations and can agree on their rankings and/or suitability for allying with one another.
• If you are in the mood, do a draft and see how the resulting alliances fare against one another.

5th Gear stores matches and lets you replay them (in the sense of reviewing them), so if scouts are missing important observations, replays can be used to train them; or if scouts are disagreeing about how to evaluate a robot/driver's performance they can look at the replay together and try to reach a consensus.

Finally, while I think this can be a great way to evaluate scouts, metrics and tools, a word of caution is apropos. Remember that a simulation is not reality. At best it is an useful approximation of important aspects of a match and leaves out others. For example, 5th Gear doesn't simulate what happens when a harried pit crew forgets to install a fully charged battery, or when a weak axle or weld bend or breaks under stress during an important match, or ...

Blake
PS: 5th Gear doesn't simulate end-of-game hanging/lifting. To factor this into a scouting exercise; roll dice to see which robots that were in position at the end of a match should be given the bonus points (while the other bots continue to score regular points).
PPS: 5th Gear doesn't assess penalties. Assign a few people to referee duty and let them keep track of penalties if you want that level of realism. They can watch over the shoulders of the players and/o watch the server's monitor.