SR2014 Comp Awards Fail

[Peter Law]

Hi,

Hopefully everyone is already aware that we gave the third place
trophy to the wrong team. Since this has only been alluded to on the
list (and I've just come across an incorrect description of it on trac
[1]), I thought some additional details should be made public. In a
follow-up post I'll also detail some of the contributing factors.

TL;DR: a data-input error, probably caused by a stressful situation,
could have been much worse. We were lucky.

By the time we'd run the final, we'd hit a pretty serious error in the
knockouts portion of the competition software (the one Sam announced
on the day). The effects of this, in combination with some of the
self-checking that the system does to try to ensure the data it has is
'correct', left us unsure about the use of even the scoring input
system.

As a result, the scoring for the final was done directly in the YAML
file which stored its scores, with Tom entering the data followed by
me reviewing it. On running the scoring scripts against the data we
got the following scores:

- RUN (17) 2
- GRD (7) 3
- CLF (22) 3
- HSO (4) 4

I've also added in brackets are the team's league positions. While
rule 1.10 specifies that we should have a tie-breaker at this point
(as it did last year), Sam overruled this (rule 2.7) due to the lack
of time (I believe we were already overrunning) and the tie was
resolved by league positions.

This gave placing order of: HSO, GRD, CLF, RUN, despite the apparently
tied second place.

After the awards ceremony, we were approached by (rookie) team RUN,
who complained that they thought they were third. After showing them
the paper score sheet from the linesmen (which was correct), and then
comparing that to the entered scores, it emerged that we had
incorrectly given CLF an upright token.

The corrected scores therefore read:
- RUN (17) 2
- GRD (7) 3
- CLF (22) 2
- HSO (4) 4

Clearly this changes the tie from 2nd to third, but it also moves CLF
down to fourth if using the league points to resolve the tie.

Something I'd not previously fully appreciated is just how lucky we
were that the league placings for CLF and GRD were the way around that
they were. We could potentially have awarded both 2nd and 3rd places
the wrong way around, which would have been much more embarrassing.

On the day, we spoke with the teachers from both CLF and RUN, and
concluded that the way forwards was to award RUN joint third place.
This was reflected in the news article, and we're also getting a
second 3rd place trophy made [1]. I believe that Sam is going to award
it to the team at their school at some point.

I'll look at some contributing factors and discuss possible
improvements to our systems in a follow-up post.

Peter

[1] https://www.studentrobotics.org/trac/ticket/2451

[Peter Law]

Hi,

I wrote:
> In a follow-up post I'll also detail some of the contributing factors.

I've just posted the technical aspects of this to srobo-devel as
"SR2014 Comp Software Fail"[1].

There were also a number of non-technical reasons for our failings on
the day, but I think that:
* a lot of it comes down to being ridiculously stressed on the day
* most of the tangible things have already been discussed

The one thing I will repeat is that we need to allow much larger
(time) contingencies for things, to have a calm space where blueshirts
can _work_, as well as having somewhere blueshirts can go to relax.
I think the middle floor worked well as the last of these, let's try
to ensure that next year we also build in the other two.

Thanks,
Peter

[1] https://groups.google.com/d/topic/srobo-devel/HaaYD-rFsj4/discussion