Slashdot Mirror
Mathematician Gives Tips On How To Win $1 Billion On NCAA Basketball
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Jake Simpson reports at The Atlantic that Mathematician Tim Chartier, a Davidson College professor who specializes in ranking methods, teaches a math-heavy form of bracketology — the science of predicting the annual NCAA college basketball tournament at Davidson College in North Carolina. Chartier's academic research is in ranking methods where he looks at things like the page-ranking algorithms of Google. 'In 2009, my collaborator Amy Langville said: "You know what? ESPN has this huge online bracket tournament. Let's create brackets with our ranking methods, just to see if it's creating meaningful information."' Chartier's formula, an evolving code-based matrix that ranks each of the 68 tournament teams, has helped several Davidson students score in the 96th percentile (or higher) in ESPN's bracket challenge and this year, Chartier's goal is to help someone win the $1 billion prize offered by Warren Buffett to anyone who correctly predicts all 63 games of the men's tournament.
Chartier uses two methods. One is the Colley Method, named after astrophysicist Wesley Colley who developed a method used by the BCS for college football (PDF). His basketball method only counts wins and losses, not margin of victory. The other method is the Massey method created by sports statistician Kenneth Massey (PDF), which does integrate scores. Chartier has not been banned from any office pools — at least none that he knows of. But as a result of coming pretty darn close to filling out a perfect bracket just by crunching the numbers, brackets have become a labor of love. 'Now that the brackets are actually out, I've had students in and out of my office all week, sharing new ideas,' says Chartier. 'For me, that's more fun than filling out a bracket. They will all be filling out brackets, so it's like I'm doing parallel processing. I know what might work, but watching them figure out the odds, is a thrill.'"
Chartier uses two methods. One is the Colley Method, named after astrophysicist Wesley Colley who developed a method used by the BCS for college football (PDF). His basketball method only counts wins and losses, not margin of victory. The other method is the Massey method created by sports statistician Kenneth Massey (PDF), which does integrate scores. Chartier has not been banned from any office pools — at least none that he knows of. But as a result of coming pretty darn close to filling out a perfect bracket just by crunching the numbers, brackets have become a labor of love. 'Now that the brackets are actually out, I've had students in and out of my office all week, sharing new ideas,' says Chartier. 'For me, that's more fun than filling out a bracket. They will all be filling out brackets, so it's like I'm doing parallel processing. I know what might work, but watching them figure out the odds, is a thrill.'"
our struggle begins? as our own worst enemies we begin to enemize each other for lack of better options? momkind unperfect timing of new clear options is in curve with her gracious patience
His predictive ability must not exceed Vegas's by any significant degree or we probably wouldn't be reading about it on slashdot.
+1 Michigan +1 Insightful if you had said Go Sparty
Not everything can be reduced to numbers, factored and condensed down to a single answer or list of probabilites. I'm a methematician and I'm here to tell you that a lot of what is presented as "mathematical" modelling in the modern world is little short of numerology and data massage.
Eventually, if you go deeply enough into these kinds of models, you will forget that there is an actual game of basketball, being played by real human players. The instant that happens, you've become a numerologist and cargo-cult scientist. My opinion is that this is occuring in an increasingly large number of "clever geeks" now equipped with powerful computers and sophormic mathematics.
May the Maths Be with you!
Well there were big upsets in the first few games. How did their model stand up to the the Chaos theory that is the March Madness Bracket?
This morning, there seems a lot of new stuff.
Perhaps there was some old stuff that needed to get pushed out of sight, out of mind.
This would be a great article to read 3 days ago
bet on the team that has the most negros that have been bred to be long and strong in the arm and leg.
won't really help when you're picking cotton but it might help when you're picking NCAA winners.
Of betting against schools with the word 'State' or a compass heading in the name.
on the #ThankYouDayton game?
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Burn him at the stake!
So what do they call it at other places?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Great to post this now, since the deadline for entering was 3/20/2014 @ 1 AM. :-/
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Start with $2 billion
Thank you....
classic slashdot
"...has helped several Davidson students score in the 96th percentile (or higher)"
If he had only 25 students, just by random chance I'd expect 1 of them to be in the 96th percentile.
I'm glad the algorithm helps people score in th e 96th percentail. However, that doesn't even mean it gets 10% of the predictions correct. It just means that it is better then or equal to 96% of the people who make predictions. There is a vast difference.
What is the percentage of correct game predictions for those scoring in the 96th percentile?
"Never bet on anything that talks"
Pick a team from each of the 63 games that you want to bet against. Offer two of their starting players a million dollars each to throw the game. Pocket the other $874 million.
This space intentionally left blank
The statistical probability is so tiny to get the perfect bracket that even if someone got close to it predicting every game up to the final four, the media frenzy around the 'perfect bracket' might be so insane that the very existence of the almost-perfect bracket could effect the outcome of the game. The players, coaches, announcers, and reporters would know, going into the game, that this team is 'winning' in the pefect bracket. There's the potential it could effect the audience's cheering and the player's mentality: the best way to get someone competitive to play harder is to tell them they can't do it. The effect would be amplified for the final game where the score has to be picked as well.
For time paradox fun, even if you had a future results bracket and brought it back to present, its existence would alter the results.
I never submitted a bracket, partially because I didn't follow the schools this year, partially because I didn't want to get spammed by Quicken - you give a cell number voluntarily to them, now you have a "relationship" where they can call you.
Two random rants as a starting point for discussion.
1) I hate the "bigger than the group of 64" games. You can't even call them play-in games if you have two 11 seeds going at it - they don't need to "play" into the tournament as much as they'd push someone else out.
There used to be some poetry in "63 teams lose their last game, one team goes 6-0 and wins the championship". The current "67 teams lose their last game, one team goes 6-0 and wins the championship, well unless they were a play-in school and they need to go 7-0" is a but more unwieldy.
2) There's so much money generated by the games now, and the players get nothing. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure a player filling out a bracket would run afoul of NCAA rules and would have their eligibility threatened. And now there's talk of forcing players to play yet another year at college before going to the pros, delaying by another year when a player can get compensated for the skills that so many are willing to pay for. A good part of this is pressure from the NBA to get more mature players of predictable NBA skill level. I'm not sure that having millionaire/billionaire owners offload their uncertainty onto 18/19 year old freshman/sophomores is all that fair.
well some with learning disabilities to the level at that they can't pass classes but is real good at sports should sue the school, the NBA, the NCAA, and others over that. Also there needs to be an minor league system for football and basketball
Every time some crystal ball expert claims something like this, I ask the same, and just 'cause he wants to "use mathematics" instead of otherworldly inspiration doesn't mean I don't ask the same:
Why would he advise someone else and not rake in the money himself?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
incorrect use, of a comma.
To get the bracket perfectly correct you have to pick a large number of improbable upsets correctly as well as all the 50:50 bets and the odds on favorites that prevail. Math is a good way to get in the 96th percentile, it won't predict the Weber St upset over Duke.
That the algorithm will say, pick Harvard, Dayton, Standford, Tennessee and Mercer? How is that even possible? Not just one, but all of those teams in the first two days. What will the next two days be like>?