A timely Friday fun fact, as it's NCAA basketball tournament time right now.
Fun article linked below describes just how
stupefyingly remote the odds are that anyone, ever, will correctly pick all the winners in all the games to be played in the rounds of the currently underway March Madness basketball tournament (March 15-April 4).
We've probably all read at one time or another just how unlikely it would be for anyone ever to call all of the 60+ games correctly (and it's REALLY unlikely), but the article is fun because it gives some amazing parallels of similar odds in more easily visualized examples.
We are told, for instance,
"A group of researchers at the University of Hawaii estimated that there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the Earth. If we were to pick one of those at random, and then give you one chance to guess which of the 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the entire planet we had chosen, your odds of getting it correct would be 23 percent better than picking a perfect (March Madness) bracket by coin flip."That works out, it says, to a 1-in- 9.2 quintillion chance of constructing a perfect bracket, consisting only of the winners.
But that, we are further told, is assuming that either team in any of the games has an equal chance (1-in-2) of winning, whereas in a lot of the games in real life one of the teams will be favored over the other, sometimes heavily, to win.
But even taking that into account, by using, say, game outcome prediction models that have been developed, it is still likely that
" ... using a model that predicts regular-season games correctly 75 percent of the time (and that's the best model that anyone has ever been able to develop) would give you odds of getting a perfect bracket anywhere between 1 in 10 billion to 1 in 40 billion."Professional sports betting websites know all about
odds, and some even offer huge prizes for a perfect bracket, or even a very successful one, knowing all the while how unlikely that that's going to happen..
From one such site:
"If anyone creates a perfect March Madness bracket, [the company] will pay them the $10 million grand prize. If no one submits a perfect bracket, [the company] will pay $100,000 to whoever builds the highest-scoring bracket." (For extra fun watch the two embedded videos in the linked article -- they're both very informative -- especially, you mathematicians, read the second one, which talks about
basketball winner prediction models. And the first one talks about
the closest anyone's ever come to getting a perfect bracket.).
Hmmmm... Well, guess I won't be counting on hauling in the big bucks from preparing, betting on, and winning a perfect March Madness bracket any time soon, but I suppose it'll still be fun to fill one out.
I just won't hold my breath in hopes of getting a perfect one, though.
https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/bracketiq/2022-03-10/perfect-ncaa-bracket-absurd-odds-march-madness-dream#:~:text=here%27s%20the%20tl%2Fdr%20version%20of%20the%20odds%20of,%28if%20you%20know%20a%20little%20something%20about%20basketball%29