Aloha!
This is my first year going to the World Event in Houston, with my team 2443, Blue Thunder from Maui, Hawaii. And I was just wondering if anyone knows, how does FRC decide on which teams go in each division? If it is random, or by selection process?
Mahalo !
There is an essentially random algorithm that determines the divisions once everyone is registered. I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran it a couple of times to ensure some level of balance, but that’s all behind closed doors.
Congrats on qualifying and see you there!
Mahalo! Thank you very much, see you there!
If they’re balancing them they’ve been doing a TERRIBLE job.
Officially, the only way the divisions are balanced is that each is supposed to have approx. the same number of total teams and rookie teams. Other than that, it’s supposed to be completely random. That being said, all of the assignments are done behind closed doors with a top secret algorithm* so there’s no way for us to really know if they do any manual balancing or not.
* read: probably just a pseudo-random number generator
If anything it’s probably “this seems like the best out of these three dice rolls.”
It’s definitely far from balanced, but it could be worse.
They allegedly balance the waitlist teams, nothing else.
Actually, a few years back I think it was Frank that posted that the process was something along the lines of spread the rookies around, then take registration order as the random sort into divisions.
They don’t even try to balance division strengths. MSC does… but I’m not quite sure how they do it.
Section 12.8.3 of the manual this year explains it
I don’t think world’s is a “district championship with multiple divisions” but I would guess they do something similar.
Here is the explanation provided by the manual.
Also attached is the system used for district championship divisions, since that is interesting.
I meant to post this yesterday and forgot to hit reply 
It seems to me that the district championship method could be adopted for Champs… You would just need to run calculations for regional teams in a way that generates comparable numbers for the district teams. If you just took the point accumulation from the event they first (or last, if they ended up generating a wildcard later in the season?) qualified for Champs in and added in a multiple to bring it into the expected range for districts (considering 2 events+district champs), I think you’d end up with something fairly accurate.
But what if a team only did 1 event in 2019 and qualified there? Would it still be accurate?
[quote=“Jon_Stratis, post:12, topic:352993”]and added in a multiple to bring it into the expected range for districts
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Hailey, the intent for regionals would be to only score 1 event for that team! The multiple would bring it in line with the district teams. As you can see from this thread, the max points available to a team at their first event is 83, and the max points available in a district is 324. That gives us a multiple of about 3.9. So take whatever points a regional team would get for that one event and multiply it by 3.9 (as a rough start… that number may need to be tweaked to get accurate results), and mix them in with all the district results.
Sounds like the easiest solution is to just implement districts everywhere. Noone wants to do math.
Oh!! Sorry Jon I misread that!
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