Reveal Group BOT Madness - Team Blue Prism

[JoshNoble1]

Do you love BOTs and Basketball? Reveal Group split over two dozen developers into teams to create the best bracket-picking robots. Read on to follow Team Blue Prism's March Madness bracket logic and then check the video to see the bracket-BOT in action.

About

Team Blue Prism’s goal for BOT Madness was to build a bot that would make all selections in a March Madness bracket based on a set of logic defined by the team members, interacting with websites to gather data, and evaluating each individual game along the way.

Blue Prism Business Objects were created to interact with “Run Your Pool”, the website hosting the brackets, “Sports News”, a website that provided Vegas betting odds for each team, and “Wikipedia”, a reference website to read in state populations. Once the bot navigated to the bracket page in “Run Your Pool”, an ID attribute was incremented through to read in the two team names and corresponding seed numbers in each match. After the match was evaluated, the ID attribute was incremented to move to the next grouping of teams. The decision logic shown below details the steps the bot took in each round to choose winners for each game in the order they are evaluated. When the bot reached a criterion that was met, it selected the winner and moved onto evaluating the next game.

Decision Logic

Round 1: With consideration of one team member’s personal connection and with a nod to the kangaroo mascot given Reveal Group started in Australia, the Bot first selects Richmond or Akron if they are present. If neither are present, the bot selects any Top 4 seeded team. If those conditions are not met, the bot then checks if a state name is included in the team’s school name. If a state is included in only one name, that team is selected. If a state appears in both or neither name, the team with a shorter school name is chosen to proceed to the next round.

Round 2: Again, using team preferences, the bot selects Richmond, Akron, Gonzaga, or Arizona if they are present. If those conditions are not met, the bot chooses the seeded team whose seed is divisible by 3 with no remainder. If both or neither of the teams are divisible by 3 with no remainder, the higher seed is chosen to proceed.

Sweet 16: In this round, the bot checks the Vegas odds for each team. If the matchup is close, the bot selects the team with the lower odds (here’s for the underdog!). If the matchup is a blowout, the bot selects the team with the higher odds.

Elite 8: Next, the bot chooses the team from the state with a greater population. If both teams are from the same state, the higher seed is chosen.

Final 4: Here, the bot chooses the team from the state with a lesser population. If both teams are from the same state, the team with a shorter school name is chosen.

Championship: Finally, to keep it simple, the bot chooses the team listed second.

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