I almost forgot to post this final blog entry because I find myself getting caught up in March Madness.
For those who don't really care about college sports (or sports in general), March Madness is the "playoffs" for men's college basketball in the USA. 64 teams begin the tournament (68 if you count the teams who play the wild card games to enter) in a single-elimination format until only one team remains.
This got me thinking - how could I use this in my math class?
This class has caused me to do this in a lot of areas of my life; whether it is for the better remains to be seen.
As it turns out, this year billionaire Warren Buffett offered any of his employees at Berkshire Hathaway $1 million per year for life if they can accurately pick every member of the sweet 16 (i.e., every team who makes it past the first two rounds of the playoffs). Additionally, in 2014 Buffett extended an offer to the public (yes, EVERYONE) saying that if anyone submitted a perfect bracket (every team picked correctly through the whole playoff bracket) they would win $1 billion. Nine zeroes. $1,000,000,000.
That would be nice.
But why would he be willing to give up so much money for something that seems so easy? Granted that the chances of winning seem small, but certainly if the 300 million members of the USA all submitted a bracket, someone would win right?
This would be a great investigation for a data class. As a side note, it seems like a lot of my investigations are for data classes, but I guess that's just my statistics degree shining through. Students would quickly learn that predicting every winner for every game means you have to predict the winner for 63 games. If you assume a 50/50 chance for each winner (which isn't really true, but bear with me) then you would have 2^63 choices to build your bracket. This means your probability of perfectly predicting the bracket would be 0.0000000000000000108%. If you include the wild card games this probability lowers even further.
If you desired to extend this further, you could calculate the expected value of each entry in terms of how much money they would "earn" on average by creating a bracket. From here you could figure out how many entries you could expect to receive and even determine how much ad revenue the website would need to make per year or per day in order to be a profitable endeavor. While this may be complex for grade 12 students, the opportunities are endless.
I hope that some day I win $1 billion, but until then I will watch March Madness and watch my brackets bust, as they always do.
Goodbye for now,
- KJ
For those who don't really care about college sports (or sports in general), March Madness is the "playoffs" for men's college basketball in the USA. 64 teams begin the tournament (68 if you count the teams who play the wild card games to enter) in a single-elimination format until only one team remains.
This got me thinking - how could I use this in my math class?
This class has caused me to do this in a lot of areas of my life; whether it is for the better remains to be seen.
As it turns out, this year billionaire Warren Buffett offered any of his employees at Berkshire Hathaway $1 million per year for life if they can accurately pick every member of the sweet 16 (i.e., every team who makes it past the first two rounds of the playoffs). Additionally, in 2014 Buffett extended an offer to the public (yes, EVERYONE) saying that if anyone submitted a perfect bracket (every team picked correctly through the whole playoff bracket) they would win $1 billion. Nine zeroes. $1,000,000,000.
That would be nice.
Highlighted are my incorrect picks after two days,
Clearly I will not win Warren's $1 million.
Also ashamed I forgot to remove the full screen notification.
Clearly I will not win Warren's $1 million.
Also ashamed I forgot to remove the full screen notification.
But why would he be willing to give up so much money for something that seems so easy? Granted that the chances of winning seem small, but certainly if the 300 million members of the USA all submitted a bracket, someone would win right?
This would be a great investigation for a data class. As a side note, it seems like a lot of my investigations are for data classes, but I guess that's just my statistics degree shining through. Students would quickly learn that predicting every winner for every game means you have to predict the winner for 63 games. If you assume a 50/50 chance for each winner (which isn't really true, but bear with me) then you would have 2^63 choices to build your bracket. This means your probability of perfectly predicting the bracket would be 0.0000000000000000108%. If you include the wild card games this probability lowers even further.
If you desired to extend this further, you could calculate the expected value of each entry in terms of how much money they would "earn" on average by creating a bracket. From here you could figure out how many entries you could expect to receive and even determine how much ad revenue the website would need to make per year or per day in order to be a profitable endeavor. While this may be complex for grade 12 students, the opportunities are endless.
I hope that some day I win $1 billion, but until then I will watch March Madness and watch my brackets bust, as they always do.
Goodbye for now,
- KJ
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