Sunday, March 20, 2011

March Madness

I have a strange fascination with statistics and probability.  As such, rather than completely filling out a bracket randomly, or just going by seed, I decided that the best option was to roll dice.  I figure that a good goal will be to get 50% of the games correct.  This might be a project for next year where I do several hundred brackets to find an average winning percentage and a standard deviation.

In short, I've created a chart.  If the seed of the opponents are within 2 (a 3 seed vs a 5 seed, etc), then each has a half of a chance of winning.  Between 3 and 5 seeds apart, the lower seed will win on a 7+ roll of two dice (best two of three).  6-8 is 6+ (best two of three), 9-10 is 5+ (BTOT), 11-12 is 4+ (BTOT), 13-14 is 3+ (BTOT).  There is zero probability for a 16 seed to beat a 1 seed.

So I rolled up a bracket.  UCONN should win.  So sayeth the dice gods.  If I were less lazy I'd find the probabilities for you and make a nice graph to post to find probabilities of seeds winning games.

In other news, I will never get tired of CSI Miami's one liners.

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