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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 perfect

by qeorge 17y ago

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.

fleitz 17y ago
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)

by qeorge 17y ago

fleitz 17y ago

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)