FIRSTStar(TM) Rating

[Phil Chang]

another thing for this database might be consistency, how many competitions has a team won in a row. Team las Guerrillas has won 5 so far in a row, and looking for a 6th (nationals)

Champions- Cocomo Indiana-2001

Champions-for sweet repeat 2001

Champions-chief delphi invitational 2001

Champions-buckeye regional 2002

Champions-great lakes regional 2002


-TheChosun

[JamesJones]

Now that the ratings are coming together very nicely. Could they be used by FIRST to influence the pairings during seeding and division groupings during the competition? I know past performance may not be indicative of future results but does anyone think 111, 47 or 16 are going to put out a crummy bot next year? We played some robots 2 and 3 times at KSC. Can you imagine how skewed the seeding results would be if some team got stuck playing Bomb Squad 3 out of 9 matches? If we have a past robot performance metric, then the sum of that metric for one alliance pair should be approximately equal to sum of their opponents in a given match. That way, if you are a medium performing robot and the computer randomly pairs you with wildstang in one match, they should have your alliance oppose an alliance with a medium performing robot and say 47. This way seeding would be much more performance based and not as much the luck of the draw. (BTW, I'm not saying all the high seeds didn't perform well but you have to agree that for many teams there is a lot of luck involved).

This could also be used to even up the competitiveness of division. The summation of the FirstStar ratings in each division should be the same.

The only problem with this is your team gets labelled and may get stuck competing in a certain class for which you may not be suited that particular year. In other words, if you had stellar performance in the past but turned out a bad bot one year you would be competing with all the other bots that had a history of stellar performance. In other words you would get creamed. On the other hand if you had a rather poor history but turned out a great bot one year you would rise to the top like a rocket!

Hmmmmmmm.

James Jones
Engineer/Coach
Team 180 SPAM

[Jnadke]

Originally posted by JamesJones
...

James Jones
Engineer/Coach
Team 180 SPAM

I don't think using the previous year's results to set up matches is a wise idea. I'd rather go with random pairing. I don't know about anyone else, but I wouldn't want to get paired unfairly to other teams just because we did bad one year.

[SGopwani]

I definitely would not want to have pairings based on previous years ratings. It seems to me that this would place teams that will likely be strong (47, 111, 308) in much more difficult matches. The result would be that teams which have weaker records get easier matches, most likely more points, and thus higher rankings. Sure, this makes it nicer to rookie teams, but it makes the seeding/qualification ranking system somewhat obsolete, as you do not have a list of the best robots....do we really want to punish our strong veteran teams??? And do we want finals/eliminations to be full of teams with weaker schedules??? I like the random pairings, i agree that sometimes a team can get hit with a couple tough matches, but fixing the matches in this way, i feel, would only make the situation worse

[Jim Meyer]

I think a better use of data of this type would be to try to ensure that each team in a division had a relatively equal schedule. I know the system would not be perfect but ANY effort to eliminate some of the "luck of the draw" effect would be a step in the right direction.

Even something based on a teams years of experience would help. (every team would play with, and against roughly the same number of rookies, 2 year vets, 3 year vets etc.)

I think a system like this could go a long way towards having the best teams seed at the top. (We've all seen a few teams who seeded maily because they were lucky enough to have good partners.)

[Jgreenwd1]

we were higher then i thought we would be on the list. and a good job putting that toghather must have took a lot of hard work, or a lot of free time

im sorry but the only way to be fair is to keep the matches random.....i can think of a whole lot of complications that could arise by trying to match up teams by quality

first of all, the highest scoring rounds are the ones with the highest quality robots...... and out of that match one of the great robots has to lose

even when a not so good team gets carried, most of the time they cant hold the position, and if they do, they usually dont last in the finals

besides isnt this what its all about? working with everyone no matter what