cowsed
commented
3 months ago |entry|Motivation| In the 2023-2024 season, the team created a Slack Bot that would calculate teams that were eligible for excellence at worlds. After some iteration we finally developed an algorithm that reliably predicted eligible teams using the Robot Events API as well as supplied RIT VEX U with it's standings. The team slack proved a great environment for this system as team members could use their phone easily query the standings no matter their location much faster than manually going through the posted standings and calculating eligibility.
| The Slack Bot in action towards the end of VEX U Worlds 2024 |
However, due to its rushed development, the calculation relied on a hand curated list of teams that received awards at qualifying events. While this is not a difficult calculation to do using the Robot Events API, the team did not have the time to implement it before worlds. Instead, the calculation relied on one dedicated team member to visit every team's event pages to check if they were eligible and then hard-coding that list into the source code.
For the 2024-2025 season, the bot should be able to perform this calculation automatically in order to not waste valuable team time and ensure greater accuracy.
This year, we manually calculated which teams were eligible for Worlds Excellence. However, this is an easily automatable task that can be labor intensive to do by hand. However, it does require a fair number of queries and does not change very often. To speed up Slack Bot responses, we can cache the eligible teams and only recalculate every day (or less) without losing accuracy.