
Autistic Teen Picks First Two NCAA Rounds Perfectly - pavel
http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/sports/Autistic-Teen-Picks-First-Two-NCAA-Rounds-Perfectly-88916437.html
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jim-greer
Shouldn't the title say autistic teen and his older brother _claim_ he picked
a perfect bracket? There's no record of it from before the tournament started.

"CBSSports.com can not confirm Alex's entry -- the company doesn't track
entries to their Bracket Manager program."

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aaronbrethorst
My collection of infinite monkeys almost hammered out a perfect manuscript for
Hamlet last night. Unfortunately, they messed up Hamlet's monologue in Act 3
Scene 1: "To be or not to be, that is the question. Cornell is going to kick
the crap out of Wisconsin."

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qeorge
The article misquotes the odds of picking the first two rounds correctly. 1 in
13,460,000 is the historical odds of picking the first 2 rounds correctly if
you always picked the top seed in each game.

In other words: think of the tournament's seeding as a bracket filled out by
the NCAA itself. There's only a 1 in 13 million chance that it will be right
through the first 2 rounds.

What this kid did is amazing. Its more than the inevitable result of enough
random guesses.

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houseabsolute
Hrm, hang on a second. That actually makes it sound substantially less
impressive. There are five million people playing this year on ESPN alone.
Even if we assume that only a quarter of them have guesses that are as
predictive as the seed numbers, that would mean we'd only have to go a decade
or so before we'd get a situation like this.

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qeorge
ESPN is a great example. This year no one predicted even the first round
correctly, much less the first two. In fact, only 3 people out of 5 million
got only one game wrong _in the first round._

The main problem with your logic is that most people make the same choices.
For example, only 1% of ESPN brackets had Cornell surviving the first 2 rounds
this year, while 73% thought Kansas would make the championship.

To my knowledge, no one on ESPN.com has ever predicted all 65 games in the
first 2 rounds correctly.

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houseabsolute
> The main problem with your logic is that most people make the same choices.

You are right, my analysis is terrible. Boom, inferiority admitted.

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NathanProphet
His picks are not random events; therefore, you cannot calculate the odds of
his picking the 48 winners so easily. Did he also pick the play-in winner
(Arkansas Pine Bluff)? I doubt it. This could be a hoax unless he registered
his picks at the start, and where he could not change them. Perhaps we've all
been had.

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fleitz
The odds of winning the lottery are highly improbable yet every almost every
week someone wins it.

That said if he is that good reliably, there is lots of money to be made on
sports betting.

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qeorge
The lottery is a poor, if often used, comparison for the odds involved in
picking the NCAA tournament correctly. Picking 2 rounds of the NCAA tournament
perfectly is orders of magnitude harder than picking the winning lottery
numbers.

For starters, in the lottery:

1) No selection (number) is better than another. i.e., the winners are random

2) Each round has no effect on the next

3) The conditions of the experiment will not change

The NCAA tournament is the opposite:

1) Some selections (teams) are clearly better than others. Furthermore, the
tournament is structured to give the best teams the best chances of winning.

i.e., selection is not random.

2) Each round limits the possible outcomes of the next. To have a chance of
picking Round 2 correctly, you must have already aced Round 1.

3) Each game can be affected by an unlimited number of variables. For
instance, if John Wall gets hurt it would alter the chances of a Kentucky
national championship. More subtly, so could a delayed flight.

Even picking the correct lottery numbers twice in a row is not a fair
comparison, because the results of the first experiment have no bearing on the
second.

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fleitz
Non-random events are generally a lot easier guess correctly at than random
events. This is why people will do things like card count or use weighted dice
/ coins with two heads / tails, etc. This is also why SSL keys are generated
from random data rather than weighted data.

I'd love to play the lottery if I knew certain balls were weighted more
heavily than others.

If you think non-random events are difficult to predict, give me your
longitude and latitude and I'll predict with in five minutes what time the sun
will rise tomorrow. Want to bet $1000 against?

The real reason the it is more difficult is because the odds randomly are 1 in
4 billion for the first round, where as a lottery like the 6/49 is 1 in
13,983,816. However, the NCAA is not completely random, it would be difficult
to discern what the real odds are but the fact that many players are within a
couple games should give you some clue to the decrease in odds given the extra
information.

If 100 million brackets are filled out and the realistic odds are 1 in 1.5
billion (given the extra information) then someone should fill out a perfect
bracket every 15 years. If you look at the prizes being offered for a correct
bracket, it should give you some indication as to the greatly reduced odds
that one actually faces. If the odds are really 2^48 for a correct 2 round
bracket then it would stand to reason that you could offer a 1 trillion dollar
prize for a correct bracket with a ticket price of $1 and still have a house
margin of 99.64%

100 - ((1 / ((2^48) / 1 trillion)) * 100) = 99.644

This simply isn't the case. (My math may be way off, I was never a stats
major)

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antidaily
Purdue is +6000 to win the tournament btw.

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antidaily
or 60/1.

