Feeling Idiotic?
Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 3:10 am
No need to feel alone.
Feel pressure now?
The odds of correctly predicting the outcome of every game in the NCAA Tournament:
1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808
By MICHAEL OVERALL World Staff Writer
3/17/2007
Even with a doctorate in mathematics, the professor can think of only one word to describe a number this big.
"Wow."
The equation itself is quite simple, explained John Nichols of Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee: For any given game in the NCAA basketball tournament, a fan has a 1-in-2 chance of picking the winner.
If you wait until the Final Four to fill out a bracket, that's only three games, letting you calculate the odds by multiplying 1/2 by 1/2 by 1/2 -- giving you a 1-in-8 chance of getting all three right.
"But if you fill out a bracket for the whole tournament," Nichols warned, "the number becomes astronomical."
Truly, literally, astronomical .
If you took a spaceship to the sun, 93 million miles away, and back again to Earth, and you filled out a different bracket for every mile that you traveled, you would need to make the trip 10 billion times before you were likely to get the bracket entirely right, Nichols said.
Or, to put it another way, if you had to pick the "right" star in the Milky Way galaxy, it would in comparison be a sure bet.
To be precise, Nichols calculated the odds of correctly predicting the outcome of every game in the tournament as 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
Rounded off, that's 1 in 9 billion billion, or 9 followed by 18 zeros.
"Every man, woman and child on Earth would win the lottery before anybody came close to running the bracket," said Joseph Maher, an assistant professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State University.
The calculations, of course, assume that every team has an equal chance of winning a game. And everybody knows that's not really true.
Some teams are better than others. And some fans know more than others, giving them an advantage in their picks.
But it doesn't help much.
"Even if you could somehow cut the odds in half," Maher said, "it's still a very big number. I'm not sure that anybody could do better than random."
Undeterred, more than 35 million Americans fill out brackets each year. The tournament creates such a distraction that it costs U.S. employers $1.2 billion in lost productivity, the Chicago consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has estimated.
Instead of trying to predict the whole tournament from the beginning, many fans fill out the brackets one round a time. But the odds remain a long, long, long shot: 1 in 4.2 trillion of getting the first round right.
Maher described it the same way as Nichols did:
"Wow."
Feel pressure now?
The odds of correctly predicting the outcome of every game in the NCAA Tournament:
1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808
By MICHAEL OVERALL World Staff Writer
3/17/2007
Even with a doctorate in mathematics, the professor can think of only one word to describe a number this big.
"Wow."
The equation itself is quite simple, explained John Nichols of Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee: For any given game in the NCAA basketball tournament, a fan has a 1-in-2 chance of picking the winner.
If you wait until the Final Four to fill out a bracket, that's only three games, letting you calculate the odds by multiplying 1/2 by 1/2 by 1/2 -- giving you a 1-in-8 chance of getting all three right.
"But if you fill out a bracket for the whole tournament," Nichols warned, "the number becomes astronomical."
Truly, literally, astronomical .
If you took a spaceship to the sun, 93 million miles away, and back again to Earth, and you filled out a different bracket for every mile that you traveled, you would need to make the trip 10 billion times before you were likely to get the bracket entirely right, Nichols said.
Or, to put it another way, if you had to pick the "right" star in the Milky Way galaxy, it would in comparison be a sure bet.
To be precise, Nichols calculated the odds of correctly predicting the outcome of every game in the tournament as 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
Rounded off, that's 1 in 9 billion billion, or 9 followed by 18 zeros.
"Every man, woman and child on Earth would win the lottery before anybody came close to running the bracket," said Joseph Maher, an assistant professor of mathematics at Oklahoma State University.
The calculations, of course, assume that every team has an equal chance of winning a game. And everybody knows that's not really true.
Some teams are better than others. And some fans know more than others, giving them an advantage in their picks.
But it doesn't help much.
"Even if you could somehow cut the odds in half," Maher said, "it's still a very big number. I'm not sure that anybody could do better than random."
Undeterred, more than 35 million Americans fill out brackets each year. The tournament creates such a distraction that it costs U.S. employers $1.2 billion in lost productivity, the Chicago consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has estimated.
Instead of trying to predict the whole tournament from the beginning, many fans fill out the brackets one round a time. But the odds remain a long, long, long shot: 1 in 4.2 trillion of getting the first round right.
Maher described it the same way as Nichols did:
"Wow."