Possible seeding problem at regionals

[archiver]

Posted by Patrick Dingle at 1/7/2001 10:13 AM EST


Other on team #639, Red B^2, from Ithaca High School and Cornell University.



I was thinking last night as I miserably failed to fall asleep, about the scoring system for this year. The maximum possible score, I think, is 1320. That's if all small balls (40) are in goal plus two big balls (20pts) plus 4 robots in endzone (40pts), and you have two goals on balanced bridge (x2x2), and match ends in first 30 seconds (x3), plus 10% for one of your balls is on the goal. (40+40+20)*2*2*3*1.1 = 1320. Did I miss anything?

Anyway, the possibility for a large score that is way, way above the average score concerns me a lot. Consider an alliance randomly formed that contains 3 or 4 outstanding robots, and they get a huge score. Since this score is 4, 5, or 6 times the average score, it becomes near-impossible to catch up to the 4 teams of the alliance for the rest of competition. If this happens, these teams finish 1-2-3-4. All the other matches they play are pretty much meaningless. Therefore I predict that in many regionals, the top 4 seeded teams will be teams that played together in a match. Maybe it would make more sense for FIRST to take the sum of the square roots of all your scores, not the plain sum?

Patrick