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Glen
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 16 Jun 2004
Posts: 9481
Location: Where you least expect
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Well i have a metric tonne of thoughts to spray onto the interwebs soonish when it comes to public events lol. But i reckon that was a good event considering and everyone worked super hard.
Before i take off on a potentially misguided diatrabe on nothing in particular, i have to say i don't and never have totally understood how our scoring system goes so won't weigh on that (not being a facetious bastard when i say that ). I stole the Qld system for my ant event cause it can be all done on paper/whiteboard easy enough and i understood it + wanted to keep a handle on everything personally. I don't doubt our setup is more 'politically correct' when it comes to dealing with every conceivable outcome. But it flies way over my thick head
A simplified posting of the methodology to it would be kinda nice. If only for posterity and reference.
Anyway, seems as though we are trying to take on everything at once, like event organisation and running of the day effectively while trying to get multiple robots going. It doesn't work anywhere lol. Example - find a sport where a competitor is running the event
There needs to be a dedicated third party to just oversee the event on the day itself, which is a basic job lets be fair. Bark at people to get their robots together in short order, announce, list fights, look after the computers/whiteboard draw and such. But when you're trying to replace gear-motors and tiny parts in your beetles and ants time slips away at an alarming rate.
Ditto on the judges. at least two people that can dedicate themselves to the task who aren't competing would be ideal, specially for the 'show' aspect The announcer can confer with them after a fight and have it be explained why robot a won etc. Just a nice professional touch to the overall production of the event i think.
Following on from all that, a bit of empathy couldn't hurt. From a crowd standpoint, its just randomised meaningless fights. Good fights for sure, but what reason is there to stay and watch for the day when this is the case.
Showing the crowd how the competition is progressing is a MUST imho given at the end of the day this is a...... well, competition lol. At one of the ideas festivals they showed a spreadsheet with the running points tallied up on the giant screen for the round robin competition. That was great not only from a competitors standpoint, but i do remember vividly the crowd looking up at the scoreboard and pointing out which robots were fighting from the scoreboard when announced.
I may be biased on that front, having fond memories of smashing the VCR onto record and dying of anticipation when the semi finals and finals were finally on FOX 8 for robot wars UK ;p
The beetle arena is probably as good as it will ever be (aka it now goes up without resorting to hammers and swearing !) our next focus should be on getting the 'show' side of things smoothed out and running well. We can run events for ourselves no problem. We've done that for nearly 10 years. Lets go to the next level and put something on the crowd can get into just as much as they did with the old robot wars
With the above and a general visual improvement of the inside of the arena, maybe give it some kind of thematic look battlebots and Robotwars style, as well as a robot activated pit in the least should give us a perfect base to go from
Oh and Lastly, on a more trivial note, as Jaemus remarked, we should have plastered the arena in our banners and website address. But that's 20/20 hindsight D'OH!
Interested in everyone on the boards thoughts anyway. I know these discussions never find that golden bullet that will shoot our little hobby back into the mainstream, but a little improvement here and there can never go astray. _________________ www.demon50s.com - Minimoto parts
http://www.youtube.com/user/HyzerGlen - Videoooozzz
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Mon Jul 30, 2012 11:08 pm |
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Valen
Experienced Roboteer
Joined: 07 Jul 2004
Posts: 4436
Location: Sydney
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i'll start at the end but this is a braindump and its almost 3 am.
If we want the rounds to "run better" we need to post a timetable.
I don't kick you guys into line because
1) your my freinds and nobody wants to say "frank your 15 seconds late getting your bot into the marshalling area you forefit this round.
2) I'm not the E/O that's their job lol.
If we want it to run like that I'm happy to do it if I can have an assistant who can take over when my bot is busted and i need to work on it.
If we split the E/O and "Round Manager" into 2.5 jobs with a set timetable in advance, i think everybody can have a bot and do their job at a public event.
What is needed for smooth running of a match is an umpire, separate role from the judges, just like in the boxing. A person who is umpire is responsible for pausing the match and asking competitors to show movement, also for pausing and allowing unsticks etc. This is the person the drivers need to talk to during the match about any issues they are having. Presently this is "self governed" and it tends to work out rather poorly as everybody has different styles and definitions of disabled.
Registrations is where the current program sucks and why i haven't handed it out to everybody to use yet, i never got around to making it work because i could just edit the database by hand good enough. I'm integrating it with the botregister system now so it should make all that stuff simpler and i hope to pass it out for everybody to use in the not too distant future. Also i think a rule of no photo = no registration is a good one. I Have a bit more time up my sleeve these days and it has actually been making some progress.
Instant feedback is required, However I haven't yet worked out a good way of achieving this. The printer is the best idea I've had as internet access at events is often crappy at best. I may have some spare laptops that i could donate to the club that we could use for competitors to check their scores on and such in real time? would that be good enough?
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I have tried a few times to explain the scoring system but if the concept of an average is a distant memory you may want to brush up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
There's alot of words here but i'm trying to break the concepts down as simply as possible. If you have a question please ask it. If you don't understand it odds are other people won't either so its better to speak now.
The goal when we started all this was to have exciting finals, lots of matches and a fair system. We wanted to reward exciting bots and reliable bots. If you have a mediocre wedge, don't expect to be granted a free pass to the finals because you didn't loose all day, if the next wedge along was winning epicly and you were just doing good enough then he should go through and you shouldn't.
We also wanted "exciting" and interesting bots to get through even if they didn't win all their rounds, chaotic tendencies springs to mind here.
With that as the goal this is how it works
The simple side of it is the straight win/loss, fairly simple to understand, going back to classic RW judging, who immobilised who, who was controlling the match etc.
(We should have hard criteria for all this btw)
The only trick here is if a judge can't decide they are allowed to award multiple winners (or losers), so its possible for both robots to win a match (a tie if you will) also its possible for both to loose if they suck too hard to call it.
The points are awarded on the basis of how the bot compared to all matches ever, well that was the original meaning for it looking at how the scores are being allocated these days its more like a measure of audience appeal. How exciting was the bot in the ring. I don't view this as a bad thing per say but it is different to how it all started, if we want to use it like this then that's fine.
The tricky part of the system is handling byes, forefits and "skips" and i think this is what confuses everybody.
Any system where you allocate a fixed number of points for a bye/forefit means that if you are sucking that day a bye improves your overall score, if your kicking ass then it penalises you.
What we do is add up all the fights you have *actually been in* and work out your average score.
So if you win 3 matches and get a bye for the 4th and final say.
3 wins / 3 rounds (ignoring the bye) = an average win ratio of 1 (ie you win all your fights)
if you win 2 fights and loose 3
2 wins / 5 rounds = a win ratio of .4
Even though the second person had more rounds the comparison is still as fair as we can make it.
A skip counts as half a round
so if you win 2, skip 1 then loose 1 you get
2 wins / 2 rounds + 1 loss and .5 of a skip =
2 / 3.5 = .59
The reason for the skip is to punish people for missing a round, but not as much as entering then forefitting, so we can give active competitors a better round with fewer byes. With our draw system there is only 1 bye per round if nobody forefits.
We do the same with the points, to come up with an average score.
To select the finalists, we take the two bots with the highest win ratio and the two with the highest score, in that order. This in theory gives us the two "champion" robots as well as the two most exciting/dangerous but unreliable robots and pits them against each other in the final.
To split ties, we use the highest of the other category. IE 3 bots with a win ratio of 1, we take the 2 highest scores.
Highest win ratio vs lowest score, middle vs middle gives the semi finals.
That's how the current system works.
If we want to dump the score aspect of it and just use straight wins with the 4 highest bots going through that's fine, but you need some way of splitting a tie.
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The draw
The goal of the draw was to try and give the builders as much variety as possible.
Its a modified round robin system.
Basically as we generally have way more bots than we have rounds it tries to pick an optimal "round" given the available competitors.
That means it tries to avoid state vs state matches and team vs team matches, but it will still run those if it means avoiding a repeat of an earlier match. It runs through every possible combination of matches available with the current selection of bots to spit out the "best" round. Provided the registration info is accurate i think we all agree the fights we get out of it are the best we could ask for. There is provision to do things like favour spinner Vs brick but we didn't put that in as it seemed like it was going too far into meddling with the matches, taking the randomness out of it.
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Also andrew, you have a habit of "winning" the match, but then rather than showing that the other person is immobilised and your fine. You keep attacking them so its quite hard to determine if they are immobile or your both just flying into each other, I try to pay particular attention to it looking for wheel rotation and the like but its not easy, if you suspect the other person is disabled, drive away from them and do a figure 8, shows you are in full control and that the other person can't move to attack you. You have won and the round is over. _________________ Mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets
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Tue Jul 31, 2012 2:44 am |
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andrew
Joined: 16 Jun 2004
Posts: 3110
Location: Castle Hill, Sydney. N.S.W
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ok i understand most of that the part i disagree with is how the champions are decided on points which adds favouritism into the mix of designs. Spinners are more exciting then a well driven wedge but a well driven wedge can win most matches depending
My match with glen i considered damn exciting, i brought it to him, controlled him for some periods, he gave me some good whacks and i still came back pushing the action. We were both considered immobile roughly same time hence the match went to judges and Glen got the nod. I understand and respect that. My next match was against the noodler which was a frustrating clash of designs where i couldnt do much to him not due to lack of effort.
I got a buy, my opponent forfeited and i was out of the comp.
I had no controll on who i fought and when yet if i say drew your ring spinner or hammerhead than that would have been a much more exciting match where i may have scored higher
Long story short what occured was out of my controll and my event record was one win and one loss. The only competition where that has ever occured in history of a one loss and your done comp is battlebots and robot wars. Now the reason we chose this system is so we get a good number of matches each even if we do lose a match or two and this is not what occured for me.
I put in the time to build these things to COMPETE. To put it against somebody elses design oif whatever sort and come the end of three minutes of action (or lack there of) we have us a winner and a loser
the fact that my hard work didnt even get a chance to have a crack against the best due to points is disgraceful in my opinion over things that were out of my controll. I would have loved to have been thrown in against whirlwind, hammerhead, killer again, your ring spinner or dylons melty spinner and truthfully i would have given all of them a good challenge or if not i would have stayed working long enough to get thrown around and come back in there face for more which is the recipe for the best type of match u can hope for or to get my parts scattered and go out trying.
In my eyes this is entertainment in a form but the bottom line for me is it is COMPETITION. I won one match, lost one match and the earliest i found out of what was happening was when they announced the final.
Also i keep on people as long as some of there robot still moves to push the action and keep entertainment up. I could do a team inertia of battlebots fame, get my quick hit, drive back to my corner and wait but its boring. Id rather hit the other guy upright again and keep it going as long as possible. Ive won and lost matches doing this but its the way i fight and it keeps things interesting.
End of the day ill turn up and compete no matter what majority wants to do but if i travelled interstate for an event like that and got one close loss and another shitty match i could question further supporting that event again. If i lost twice fair enough of got slaughtered in the process but one loss and
one win during rounds one after the other then hearing nothing then to find out "oh your done" is a poor way to handle it.
This is nothing personal but as a competitior i feel it could have been handled better, explained better or looked into more. My way of looking into it is the guy who wins is the guy who wins the most, not the guy whos design tickles the fancy of the three guys punching in some numbers. _________________ Andrew Welch, Team Unconventional Robotics
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Tue Jul 31, 2012 9:57 pm |
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