I’m pleased to announce that FRCLocks.com will be returning for the 2018 season! The website has been overhauled and rewritten from the ground up, with more features and hopefully a better overall experiance.
For those unfamiliar, this website gives information about the current status of a district and breaks down how close each team is to clinching their trip to district championships. Keep track of your progress in your district as the season progresses! On the rankings table for each district, this can be seen in the “Lock %” column. When this number reaches 100%, you’ve earned your way into your district championship.
It is important to note however that while teams at 100% are a mathematical certainty to move on, numbers under 100% are NOT a prediction of how likely you are to move on. It is just a representation of how close to a clinch you currently are.
Features new for 2018:
Points are awarded to teams when they should be (end of quals, selections, each round of elims, awards). Points are also removed from the district point pool in the same manner.
Points cutoff statistic: Current DCMP calculated points cutoff. (note: not predicted)
Points Remaining statistic: Points still available for grabs by teams in the district.
Events table at the top of each district page that lists points available for each event and the current state of the event.
Data cache that expires after 10 minutes - Now only one person has to suffer terrible load times after 10 minutes!
Minor text fixes
Planned features to be added in the coming few weeks:
"District Points Analysis: Mathematical Locks for Advancement
" Whitepaper by Brandon Liatys and Antonio Papa - Event Information Page: Breaks down information specific to each district event
Team Information Page: Breaks down information specific to each team
If any errors are found on the rankings list, please be sure to let me know.
Special thanks:
Antonio Papa - Man behind the math
Eugene Fang - 24/7 TBA tech support
Brian Lucas - Inspiration for the project
In order to understand the nuances of the site, would it be possible to see a sample? For example, if current algorithms were applied to 2017 teams at the point in the season of each district’s last qualifier, what would the rankings have been?
Having done regression from the TBA API before, I fully-understand that this is a big ask, and that depending on data compatibility it may not be possible.
Just wanted to take a moment to explain some of the things you might see, now that the season has progressed a bit.
A team highlighted in blue is locked into District Champs (DCMP) via winning a District Chairman’s Award (DCA)
A team highlighted in **green **is locked into DCMP by mathematically clinching their slot.
A team highlighted in red is locked out of DCMP because they are below the cutoff and have no points earning plays remaining.
Sometimes, you may notice teams have a small negative lock percentage. This is because the teams below them will pass this team and knock them out of the DCMP, just by these teams showing up to their event and earning the minimum points. If a team shows a negative lock percent, and also has no points plays remaining, this team is also locked out and shown in red.
No team has clinched yet in any district (except for DCA winners), but I’m expecting a few of the high points earning teams to lock in this weekend. Israel currently has the closest team at 98.48%. After these initial teams lock in, we can watch as the points cutoff slowly creeps down the ranking list.
But what is the lock percent?
The lock percent is a ratio of points needed by the teams below you to throw you out of your DCMP slot, to the total points remaining in the district. The theory is that once the points needed by the below teams is greater then the points remaining in the district, you have mathematically clinched your spot. There are many other assumptions made along the way, but this is the general gist of it.
I’m curious as to how the current points cut off is calculated. I’m looking at PNW and it’s current points cutoff of 201. That is more than 2x the maximum number of points achievable at a single event.
You get 68 for winning the event from the #1 seed position.
5, 8 or 10 for awards, or the possibility of 15 if you pickup the safety award on top of a 10 point award.
Then a 5 or 10 point age bonus.
So the highest achievable points at a single event are 83 and that would include an award that couldn’t be earned again that season. So 83+78 or 161 and even with 10 point first year bonus the max would be 171.
In the PNW 154 points was the highest pre-DCMP total for 2017 and 149 for 2016. And of course the point totals for the teams below them drop off significantly as you move down the list as there can only be 1 #1 seed, 1 DCA, 1 RAS, ect one group of winners at each event.
Current points cutoff is the points cutoff in the district as of right now. If a team had 201 points at this time, they would be shown as 100% locked in. This cutoff lowers as events happen and points get distributed. Check out Israel for an example. The cutoff is just a couple points above the amount of points the top team currently has. As soon as the next event begins, that cutoff will lower more and the first few teams will lock in.
The cutoff itself is more of a ‘fun fact’ then anything really useful honestly. Its calculated by taking the points and lock % of the first team not locked in and solving for 100% of that ratio.
Eventually I’ll add a predicted cutoff but I can’t say that will happen this season.
Thanks to this snow day, I finally had some time to cross some stuff off my to-do list.
In an effort to help everyone understand where these numbers come from, I’ve made the following changes with the goal of the lock percent no longer being some magical number pulled out of nowhere:
Fixed the negative lock % issue
Added clickable points for each event that lead to a breakdown of how it is calculated
Added clickable lock % that lead to a breakdown of how it is calculated
Fixed other minor bugs
Now on the to-do list:
Consider Team A a lock if any Team B in the Points to Tie table needs more points then possible at one event.
For example, there is no way that frc238 isn’t a lock, because the teams near the end of that list need 100+ points from their one remaining event to tie them and knock them out.
Always listening for suggestions and such so don’t be shy!
Help wanted: If you have free time and experience with any of the following, send me a message: PHP, Python (with a web server), MySQL, graphic design/web design
Did you reach that page by modifying the url? There is no link to a points breakdown for frc1257.
1257 is currently bellow the cutoff, but is still “yellow” since they are competing at Hatboro this weekend. We can’t do a team breakdown for a team that is below the current cutoff for qualifying.
Still, we should probably look into making it fail gracefully for an invalid url. It’s probably not good to display the Auth Key like that!
Does FRCLocks transition to displaying lock percentages for Detroit or Houston at any point? If not, would this ever be a feature that you plan on adding? It is already a great resource, I just think that this might make it even more valuable to teams once district championships have been decided.
