I dont think we can do a full round robin (for time reasons)
thats what the points thing was for. Its not too hard to understand if you think about it a bit, hey if a bunch of gymnasts can do it us robot builders should be able to. I put this togther a while ago as a rough outline. The specifics are subject to change. Dad and i have been over all sorts of win/loss/draw scanerios and this is the fairest we have come up with. (btw you can do the whole thing with a calculator or a spreadsheet if you want, no special software needed.)

Registration.
All bots must be registered before the event
All judges must register, they will then be given a 4 digit code (usually the last 4 digits of your phone number)

Process
round starts ~10 minutes before fight.
at 10 minute mark builders decide to either enter or no-compete
Bots that enter are given points (3 say) bots that choose to no-compete are given more (4 say)
After this the draw is done, builders then have 10 minutes in which to do any mods etc and get their bot zipped up.

Drivers of the current bout and the next bout are exempt from judging. (so people can get their bots out of the arena and the next lot can get them in)

After the bout
If a fight finishes early a poll of judges decides if the fight is unscoreable.
If a fight is deemed unscoreable the looser gets given their entry points and the winner has the fight removed from their average IE if everybody does 5 bouts in a day then the victor of an unscoreable fight will have only 4 fights counted in his average.
If a fight is deemed scoreable then points are awarded by the judges and added to the "entry bonus" this result is used to calculate that bots average score at the end of the round.

Scoring System
After each bout the judges will enter their PIN code and will be presented with a set of categories, eg aggression damage control etc.
Judges award points between 0 and 10 for each bot on its merits IE the total of both bots dosen't have to come to 10, if both bots are super aggressive then both bots can get a 10 for aggression and both a 0 for damage if thats the case.

At the end of the day an average is generated for all fights each bot was in, excluding those in which the bot was an unscoreable winner. The winner on the day is the bot with the highest average points.


Reasoning
The thinking behind the no-compete/entry points is to discourage people with non functional bots just entering the arena, but still to give something to those who have a genuine failure in the opening stages.
The reason no-competes are still counted in the average is to stop somebody having an awesome first round then leaving the game early.
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

So in this system, each round starts with a random draw of bots and they have matches determined by the order in which they are drawn? It seems that with random draws, the element of luck plays too large a part particularly in comparison to the full roundrobin system, which is regarded as a good way to identify the "best" competitor. I just simulated the last event with seven bots, the rounds would look like this:

Round 1

Cobra - Roadkill
Retread - Orbit
TWI - Jolt

Round 2

Jolt - Cobra
Orbit - Singularity
Roadkill - Retread

Round 3

Cobra - TWI
Retread - Jolt
Singularity - Roadkill

Round 4

Jolt - Singularity
Roadkill - Orbit
TWI - Retread

Round 5

Orbit - Jolt
Retread - Cobra
Singularity - TWI

Round 6

Cobra - Singularity
Jolt - Roadkill
TWI - Orbit

Round 7

Orbit - Cobra
Roadkill - TWI
Singularity - Retread

Since there was an uneven number of bots each round has a bye, which is not shown as it takes up no time. There are 21 matches in the round robin and assuming we have matches from 10:30 am until 6pm (450 minutes), there would be a match every 21 minutes (rounding down). That is not such a fast pace, considering that the time between each competitor's matches stays fairly constant.

For a larger field of bots, it does get difficult; with twelve bots (the most I recall us ever having), 66 matches are needed with only 6 to 7 minutes between matches . The time between each competitor's matches is still fairly large however.

It seems to me that we could run a full roundrobin event with 6 to 8 bots and after that a double elemination makes more sense.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

One possible drawback to a round robin system that occurs to me is that it is likely to encourage more boring robot designs.

It. If you know that you *are* going to have to fight a bar spinner, and a flipper, and a wedge and a rammer or whatever, you are more likely to build a heavily armoured, invertible brick.

Sure, you might lose some points in some particular fights, but over all the fights your chances are probably significantly improved with the most "survivable" design.

With a random draw, it is quite possible that you can go for a whole competition without meeting your "natural enemy" opposing design - Rock(brick) vs Paper (control bot), Scissors (spinner) vs Rock (brick) or whatever, so people are more likely to "take a chance" on not meeting their most-feared opponent and come up with a design that may be incredibly weak against some bots, but effective against others.

Round Robin encourages people to try to design to meet *all* threats, and so the "species variation" is likely to decrease significantly, until you end up with a bunch of very similair general purpose, try-to-cover-everything "camels" (horse designed by a committee).

Random draws and Elimination Trees allow the possibility that you wont meet your nemesis and instead will meet a "yes ! I wanted to fight that robot" opportunity.

Or so it seems to me anyway. When thinking of alternative event structures, think of Robot Combat as a game of mechanical evolution, and niche-environments with the forces of natural selection and random mutation. Making everyone fight everyone will be more likely to generate a "monoculture" of clone bots.
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Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people

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Originally posted by Spockie-Tech:
One possible drawback to a round robin system that occurs to me is that it is likely to encourage more boring robot designs.

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It sounds like you guys are taking an overly pesemistic view of the RR system. My thinking is that when there is no elimination and more fights its a) more exciting and b) I can afford to lose a match or two, so I can take risks to get a sure win in the majority of fights. I can also count on the other guys losing a few matches to their natural enemies so I don't really have to aim for an undefeated run to win the event.

The boring box situation will only come about if everyone takes the same defensive stategy. It's more likely that if the bot designs veer that way, then someone will build a flipper or undercutter and win on points or straight KO. The most likely evolution is that bots will get better or at least replaceable armour and better quality construction. ie I will be giving Jolt bolt-on side armour and keeping plenty of spare body panels.

The point about throwing a round to avoid an un-winnable match is a possibility, but doing that more than once or twice almost guarantees that you will lose the event. If your flimsy bot was up against a powerful KE bot, you would likely lose and take serious damage, so throwing the round sounds tempting. If that started to happen, the good KE spinners would end up with easy wins and that would encourage more people to build them. The dynamics are probably a bit more complicated than that, but again, things will likely even themselves out.

If match throwing does become an issue we can balance it out by awarding more points for a win or negative points for not competing.
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Australian 2015 Featherweight champion
UK 2016 Gladiator champion

I think its a good system. I go to the events to have a many fights as possible. Sometimes I will lose my first two and get knocked out and that can be a bit frustrating, especially at an international event where I have traveled a long way to be part of it.

This system allows me to have a lot more fights over the event and when it comes down to it, isnt that why we are all there? to fight!

I would prefer to have 10 fights and lose them all than have lost two and be out, or even having won a few then lost and and being out.

note the system i preposed is a *limited* random draw.
you dont have to run every round to get a valid result.
(so you could run 60 bots in 1 day say).
Each draw is random and because you arent going to fight every other bot that addresses bretts concern.
(you get an in or out from everybody then do the draw, then you get 10 minutes mod/zipup time)

Personally i like the idea of big gaps then groups of fights, for us builders it just seems easier, you charge and repair (with everybody else) then you fight. Ok you may not get as many fights in compared to trying to get every single person to turn around in 25 minutes, but you'll actually get to watch them all *and* repair your own bot. If you dont have to run a set number of rounds to get a result then you can set a fixed start and end time and just run as many rounds as will fit into it.
IE we are running from 10:00 - 17:00 and we expect 4 rounds, we will probbly get 5 in however and so much the better, but if we dont, oh well. (keep in mind the last 3 rounds of the DE system only have one fight in each, whereas this one all availablle bots go in)

The other thing i dont like about DE is the elimination side of things, especially for the new guys (and us old guys). At least this way however long your pile of scrap stays mobile you can still have fun ;-> Its good for getting the kinks worked out of new bots too, Nothing improves your bot like arena time.
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

I like Valen's "limited random draw" but maby the winnner should get extra points, otherwhise one bot could theoreticaly be p00ning for an entire match, but get caufgt by one lucky shot and b disabled but still get more points. the other driver would NOT b happy

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I like Valen's "limited random draw" but maby the winnner should get extra points

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quote:

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be p00ning for an entire match

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I like the idea that you can have the opportunity to have more than two fights at an event. I support the concept of the round robin.
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So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems

More Fights = More Value for effort put in by bot builders and event organisers.

I'm with Bort, I'd rather battle 10 battles and lose them all then battle twice and be bored for the rest of the weekend.
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https://www.halfdonethings.com/

yes yes yes ,more battles more fun ,design and build robots that can battle all day thatss the secret .
ohh please not the brick on wheels ,non smashing robots thing ...i beleive a brick on wheels wooped everyone else in brisbane ,granted it does have a v8 under the hood ...and i believe another very little wedge came second in melbourne and is still doing very well in sydney ,and another wedge angus has built is also going very well. robot design evolution is good ,but most of the top bots in australia aint changed that much over the years
the only"possible" problem that occurs with jakes system is the judges need to be educated in the basics of judging and understand what a battle is and what the criteria means .
judging is to me still the grey area ,i recall at the last event i was standing next to a fellow roboteer both of just watching ,the fellow proceeded to jokingly rag on one of the robots in the battle saying things like ,"ohh come on such and such your being so owned" and things like that ,i proceeded to give the evil eye to sway the comments because i believed it was going to sway a judges decision.
so i believe a panel of judges should be nominated prior to each event ,a reserve judge is brought in to fill in where one might be battling and swapped back ,this is i think the most important factor ,cause i gotta say some of our best battle have come down to judges decisions
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Photos - http://community.webshots.com/album/154092733uokpXC
Photos- http://community.webshots.com/album/166819552PDWWqP

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randomly drawn rounds rounds untill A: Everyone has fought everyone else

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15 minute match = *way* too much stress

with the batching system you run *all the fights* in that round one after the other, ie no gap between them. Then everybodys "30 minutes" are taken togther.

the big thing is you dont need to run to a fixed point to get a result.
you arent pushing the clock to get stuff done (which just dont work lol)

also theres no reason why you cant random draw a round robin each round.
just so long as the compeditors havent faught before its all good.

I am working on a round drawing system that will actually go through all possible combinations of the compeditors, assign a points score to each fight in the comp (IE bots of same state 5 points, bots of same builder 10 points, bots that have faught before this comp, 100 points style of frog)
then randomly pick a draw from the lowest scoring possibilities.

by adjusting the scores you adjust how much you dislike a paticular outcome. (and also you could put in "hard rules" a fight that breaks a hard rule nullifies the draw)
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Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets

quote:

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Originally posted by Nick:

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quote:

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randomly drawn rounds rounds untill A: Everyone has fought everyone else

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quote:

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I am working on a round drawing system that will actually go through all possible combinations of the compeditors, assign a points score to each fight in the comp (IE bots of same state 5 points, bots of same builder 10 points, bots that have faught before this comp, 100 points style of frog)
then randomly pick a draw from the lowest scoring possibilities.

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