BoilerBadger

Besides the Morehead State upset, things are going as should be expected. Here is to hoping for one perfect first day!

Kentucky: 179 to 159 : 11.2% lost
Pittsburgh: 159 to 158 : 0.6% lost
San Diego State: 158 to 153 : 3.2% lost
Richmond: 153 to 75 : 52.5% lost

After only 4 games, the chances seem gone already.  Shows how hard this challenge is.  Here is a quick summary of the first four games.

West Virginia: 10,000 to 5,634 : lost 43.7%
Butler: 5,634 to 2,899 : lost 48.5%
Morehead State: 2,899 to 308 : lost 89.4%
Temple: 308 to 179 : lost 41.9%

So even with 3 favorites winning, the one large upset took care of almost 90% of the perfect brackets remaining.  Hopefully a few of these survive until tomorrow, but with one or two more large upsets, all 10,000 brackets could have a loss by tonight.

This started with a simple text exchange with one of my buddies, knowing my affinity for both math and college basketball, about how difficult it would be to fill out a perfect march madness bracket.  With about 9,223,372,040,000,000,000 potential brackets (over 9 quintillion), it is obviously quite a challenge.  So, the challenge is to simulate 10,000 brackets and find the prefect one, or at least see how good the best bracket can be.

Obviously, a majority of the work and results will be during those magnificent weeks in March when college basketball bests all.  But, until then, I will be busy preparing, figuring out the best way to simulate games and using historical data to validate the results.

For the record, the simulations will be done after the field is cut to 64 teams.  Projecting 63 games correctly is a big enough challenge for now, so sorry to the first four.

Any comments or ideas would be greatly appreciated.