FIVE- M IN U T E A N A LYST
If a similar wager cost $1 to play, it
would depend on what else you would
do with the money. Foregoing a late
afternoon soda to buy a ticket for this
game, if you enjoy talking about it,
would be OK. Dumping out your life
savings in order to play games is a terrible idea (we’ve written about this before, see July 2013 [5]). The point is
that we all do lots of things where the
odds of winning are practically zero.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. If
you derive “pleasure” out of daydreaming about winning a billion dollars or
have fun arguing basketball scores with
your friends, go for it! Just do so with
eyes open, knowing that it is incredibly
unlikely that you will win.
And don’t forget, there are also
20 first-prize winners, regardless of
whether the grand prize is given or
not, valued at $100,000. While no billion, this is no small amount of money,
and most importantly, does not require
you to be perfect, simply better than
the other players who enter. If you think
you are good at filling out your bracket,
then perhaps you should enter with the
hopes that you win the first prize. Here,
the odds are no worse than 1:750,000,
which is a number that you can start to
comprehend!
A note on calculation. I used R to
do the large calculations in this article.
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A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G
Professionals always need to be concerned about numerical stability and
floating point precision, which may be
the subject of a subsequent article. If I
did not have a good computational platform or was doing this 50 years ago,
I would resort to Sterling’s Approximation,
It’s amazing to think about all of the
computation that we simply take for
granted.
Finally, knowing that
is very handy. (If you need a proof,
start writing out numbers in binary)
Harrison Schramm (harrison.schramm@gmail.
com) is an operations research professional in the
Washington, D.C., area. He is a member of INFORMS
and a Certified Analytics Professional (CAP).
NOTES & REFERENCES
1. http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_
nut/2014/03/billion_dollar_bracket_challenge_why_
it_s_a_bad_idea_to_enter_warren_buffett.html
2. https://tournament.fantasysports.yahoo.com/
quickenloansbracket/challenge/?qls=BDB_B14qlb03.
qlredirect
3. When your exponents have exponents, the
numbers are really huge!
4. Comment: If you want real understanding in
mathematics, there is no substitute for expanding by
hand. This is how the mathematicians of 50 years ago
did things, and there is goodness in it, even today.
5. http://www.analytics-magazine.org/july-august2013/838-five-minute-analyst-carnival-game
W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G