BattleBots 2020 World Championship Tournament Preview
Prior to the start of the BattleBots season, I took a look at the field and did some slight analysis with Speed Score. The metric was invented by Andrew Flowers, then of FiveThirtyEight, with the apparent purpose of illustrating the brilliance of the early career of Ronda Rousey. You can read more about it here, but here is the example I used back in December.
The analysis includes results from the last four seasons of BattleBots (2015, 2016, 2018 and 2019). During that time span, Tombstone has gone 20-4. The percent of time remaining in the Bot’s victories was 48.42%, and it was 26.81% in losses. The following is the calculation for fight speed score.
Fight Speed Score = (20 * 0.4842) - (4 * 0.2681)
Based on a scatter plot both Speed Score and Winning Percentage, it appeared as if Tombstone was the heavy favorite for this season. However, that certainly did not turn out to be the case. The veteran did qualify for the championship tournament but only as the 21st seed.
To preview the post season tournament, I am once again using Speed Score.
I have also decided to use a quick strength of schedule calculation as well. I used the tournament seeds and assigned all non-tournament participants a seed of 40. I then took the average seed of a robot’s opponents and ranked those averages on a scale of 0 to 1.
Strength of Schedule = 1 - (Average Opponent Seed - Min Average Opponent Seed) / (Max Average Opponent Seed - Min Average Opponent Seed).
The resulting scatter plot of Speed Score and Strength of Schedule paints a pretty nice picture for Uppercut. The bot, created by MIT students, went 2-1 this season with quick victories over SawBlaze and Gemini (unfortunately not Gemini from American Gladiators). Uppercut’s only defeat came against Hydra, who holds the first seed. Speed Score does not look too kindly on Hydra since all their wins came via decision, but they did face a tough schedule.
Having Uppercut as the favorite aligns with my anecdotal observations, which probably is not a good sign. On top of that, Speed Score heavily favored Tombstone prior to the year. With all that being said, we will know the champion soon enough. As Chris Rose says, let the bot battle begin!
