Having been busy finishing our own robots over the past few weeks, we let TwentyFour lapse. Now though, the data is coming in live and we’ve got our spreadsheets working. Scores are higher than we expected, which is awesome!
We didn’t make predictions about Ultimate Ascent, in large part because we didn’t want to make fools of ourselves. We are now quite glad we did that, because we would have made fools of ourselves! After a full day of Ultimate Ascent all across the country, the average (mean) score was 41.4 points, and the median (50th percentile) was 37 points. That is higher than we were expecting, and we are quite pleased to be wrong!
Breaking it out across the 4 phases of game play (formatted as MEAN | MEDIAN)
Wow, those game time specific averages really show how evenly distributed point values are this year. I guess the GDC really knows how to score a game.
Well, Ian, looks like we both would have made fools of ourselves. We both thought climbing and dumping for 50 would win the vast majority of matches. We were wrong.
I’m just blown away. If this is day one of week one, we could easily see week four scores hit 60 points per alliance. This means all those teams that invested heavily in 30 point climbing, like mine, were dead wrong.
While a 50 point robot will not win every match, its still a 70th percentile alliance by itself. It also doesn’t depend much on what the other alliance does, which may be worth more on Saturday as teams begin to play more effective defense. I am impressed with the number of teams that chose to hang – I wonder if everyone actually learned their lesson in 2010?
Perhaps the most exciting thing that I didn’t include is the rate at which teams are getting better. If you drew a trendline through last year’s matches, on average teams were scoring 1.5 times as many points at lunch on Saturday than they were at opening ceremonies on Friday. This year, teams were scoring 1.5 times as many points at close of business today than they were at opening ceremonies today! Assuming that trend continues, not only is this game higher scoring out of the gates, teams are getting better faster.
I’m actually not that surprised at how high scoring the game is this early, at least in Teleop and Autonomous. Rebound Rumble showed the importance of Autonomous in qualifications, and I’m sure in influenced many teams in regards to designing their robot with Autonomous in mind as more than “shoot what is given to you”(ie. doing ground pickup primarily for auto). And in regards to teleop, shooting a frisbee is a MUCH MUCH easier task than shooting a basketball.
I’m going to wait until HH and CVR are over to do the full review, but just for fun here are today’s elimination means and medians. (formatted as mean | median)
Having watched several webcasts, we are impressed by the caliber of robot and level of gameplay. Many close, exciting elimination matches and very different looking robots. Like Karthik said at FLR, “This is only Week 1 folks. This is only Week 1.”
Hats off to the GDC!
EDIT: Attached a Histogram overlaying Quals and Elim Scores. That low a percentage of zero scores is crazy, haven’t seen that since Overdrive.
I was at the Kettering FiM event and saw a huge percentage of 2 wheel linear shooters with AM pneumatic wheels. Does anyone care to speculate on the Robot in 3 Days impact?
I had a hard time finding a robot that was not influenced in one way or another by the work they did. Linear shooter might have been the most obvious but hopper and hanger style had a great resemblance too. I think they definitely made a huge impact in raising the bar of competitiveness in FIRST teams throughout the nation. Can’t wait to see how the program effects teams in the years to come.
