FIRST Impressions of Ultimate Ascent

We’re still alive!  We got a little busy building our own rowboats, so we went missing for a while, and now we’re back!

Look Ma! It’s reasonably close to normally distributed!

We didn’t make predictions about Ultimate Ascent, in large part because we didn’t want to make fools of ourselves.  We are now quite glad we did that, because we would have made fools of ourselves!  After a full day of Ultimate Ascent all across the country, the average (mean) score was 41.4 points, and the median (50th percentile) was 37 points.  That is higher than we were expecting, and we are quite pleased to be wrong!

Breaking it out across the 4 phases of game play (formatted as MEAN | MEDIAN)

AUTONOMOUS: 12.3 | 12
TELEOP: 13.2 | 9
CLIMBING: 13.2 | 10
FOULS: 2.6 | 0

If you compare this back to our Rebound Fumble analysis, at the end of the first day of Week 1, teams are scoring about twice as many points in autonomous, three times as many points in teleop, and twice as many points in the end game!  While climbing isn’t really 1:1 with balancing, thanks to the point structure shooting pretty much is.  Whether the higher scoring nature of shooting is from the game (the goals are way better) or teams (robots are better) is an open question at this point.  Either way, we think higher scoring games are better for everyone.

Check out the plots below:

While zero is still the most common score, way more frisbees are going goals than basketballs did.  Three Alliances have gotten a 48 point “ one less than perfect” score.  Who will be the first to do perfect and then perfect plus? Congrats 191, 3838, 145, 862, 3667, 302, 910, 68 and 70!  (Bin width is 6, and zero is its own bin)

Again, the teleop scoring distribution is much flatter and goes to much higher scores.  Major props to “the outliers” so far, 610, 230, and 1922 at BAE!  610 also took part in the second highest teleop score as well with 229 and 4124.

There have been two 60 point climbing alliances, both of them at BAE.  I believe 213 and 1277 got a double 30, and 213 also took part in the other 60 pointer that was a 30+20+10. (bin width 10, zero is its own bin)

For the most part a fairly foul-free game.  Still, stay clear of interfering with a hang as there are a few 20 pointers on the board, one alliance wracked up over 100! :( (bin width 3, zero is its own bin)

Have fun at the competitions!