Apr 10, 2023 Written by Collin Fultz, FIRST Robotics Competition Senior Program Director
Interns
After a few years’ hiatus, I’m excited to announce that interns are back this summer for FIRST ® Robotics Competition! These folks will help us test robots, field elements, control systems, and the Kit of Parts for the 2024 season.
All three roles will have some time in the office in Manchester, New Hampshire.
We’re aware of an issue that impacted the district points calculation for districts that had multiple divisions at their District Championship. We have identified the impacted teams, and we’ve made sure the correct teams have received invitations to the FIRST ® Championship presented by BAE Systems.
TBA is showing a +0 by all the teams who should’ve gotten playoff or impact award points; this is probably the mentioned issue. It may include playoff teams who didn’t win points, but otherwise the TBA rankings page is probably a good list.
Pretty crazy no one is double checking the numbers that are put in the system. Every point matters when teams on the bubble for the champ are so close in the rankings. Noticed that same mistake with the points as well, good think it was noticed.
My understanding is that the delay (mentioned in the linked thread) between playoffs concluding and champs advancement being announced is when HQ manually reviews points to catch cases like this. I’m not sure exactly what happened with specific teams at specific DCMPs this year.
Pretty crazy that FIRST’s backend code for calculating EVERYTHING including district points isn’t on a GIT somewhere so that their thousands of very bright FIRST students couldn’t look over it and make sure its right and then submit bugfixes.
Heck I’m a dinosaur yet still would have spent 20 minutes to figure out exactly where the mistake was, put in the easy one or two line fix in whatever language they used: (namely to reset alliance_points=0 if qualification_points==0), and made a issue + pull request
instead of hoping for a correction via an Easter CD thread.
