I have an excel program that computes all the flight groups for MoM contests
also accounting for frequency conflicts.  It's the same one we use for all
of our contests including the Team Selection events.  It does all of the AMA
tasks as well as F3J and handles regular matrix flight groups, and Seeded
MoM (either by total score or previous flight group).  I'd be happy to send
it out to anyone that is interested.

Jim

Jim Monaco
President - Rocky Mountain Soaring Association
Denver, CO
http://www.rmsadenver.com


-----Original Message-----
From: tony estep [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 8:17 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [RCSE] Matrix MOM

While sending out scoring spreadsheets for seeded MOM, I got a request for a
spreadsheet to set up the flight groups for matrix MOM. I don't know how
many are interested, since matrix MOM is not flown too often, but I thought
I'd post this comment.

There's no need for a computer to set up the flight groups for matrix MOM,
since the process is easily done by hand. If there are frequency conflicts,
it gets more complicated, and a computer program could be used to do optimal
grouping, but let's stick to the simple case.

The process is as follows: First, determine the number of flyers in each
group. This will depend on the number of winches available. Then, give each
flyer a unique identifying number, and set the groups by permuting the
numbers. It's easiest to explain with a simple example.

Suppose there are 16 flyers and you have four winches. Then you number the
sixteen flyers like this:
1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, 30, 40, 100, 200, 300, 400, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000. 

The first digit goes only up to 4 because there are 4 in a flight group. If
there were to be 5 in a group, it would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50
etc.

Then make as many numbers as possible that do not contain the same pair of
digits. In this case, there are sixteen such numbers:

1111    2222    3333    4444    Groups for round 1
1234    2341    3412    4123    Groups for round 2 
1341    2412    3123    4234    Groups for round 3
1412    2123    3234    4341    Groups for round 4

To interpret this, read each digit as the ID number of a flyer. For example,
the first group in round 4 is 1412. That means that it consists of flyer
1000, flyer 400, flyer 10 and flyer 2.

You don't have any flyers with numbers containing more than four digits, so
you can have only four rounds before you start having duplication in the
groups. If you had twenty (or more) flyers, you could have five rounds, and
so on.

Of course, there are other four-digit numbers using 1, 2, 3, and 4, but they
all contain one or more pairs of digits that are already used in the set
shown (unless I made a mistake, which is certainly possible).

With a little experimentation, you can see what happens if there are
frequency conflicts, figure out the tradeoffs between group size and number
of rounds, and so forth. You can see that it's easier to get conflict-free
groups for a big contest than for a small one, because the number in a group
is small compared to the number of flyers. Of course, small contests are
usually flown as seeded MOM, so this isn't a problem.



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