by now i assume most people have heard of the billion dollar bracket challenge, offered by fox or something, insured by none other than the great warren buffet. to win, you have to have a PERFECT bracket, with every game predicted.
im curious what people think the odds are of this ever happening, and how much buffet would charge to insure this 1 billion dollar potential loss. 10 million?
for starters, to oversimplify, if there is a 50% shot of picking each game, you basically have 1 in 2^67 chances of winning (assuming 68 games in the NT). 2^60 is a billion billion. so even if everyone in the world fills out a bracket, there is almost no chance anyone wins.
however, i think the real world is more complex than this. obviously a good deal of games are a lot easier than 50/50 to pick, like maybe in the first round, you could call half the games gimmes (which is obviously not the case, as 2, 3, and 4 seeds lose, but its a lot easier using 100% and 50% than weird numbers in between :), and half toss ups - this would cut out 16 games. in the second round (or maybe its called the third round now, but i HATE that nomenclature), maybe a quarter are gimmes, that would cut 4 more. if its all toss ups from there on out, that would cut 20 games. 2^47 isnt as bad, thats only 1 in 128 trillion. ok, still pretty bad :) but if a billion people did it, thats only 1 in 128,000 someone wins.
to me the interesting side comes from fixing. there is like, no way in hell you can rule that out - given the chance of someone winning legitimately seems to be approximately zero. i would be pretty afraid if anyone in gambling got close, they'd be working to fix the rest. its a lot to do in a short time, however, and the risk is probably low. but with a billion dollars on the line, its pretty hard to rule anything out!
if the odds are even close to 1 in 128,000 of someone winning with a billion entrants, it seems the insurance would only be the cost of the underwriting process (this kind of analysis) plus a small profit, plus the estimated expected loss - as 1 in 100,000, the expected loss is only 10 grand, which is nothing. there's no way fox could have gotten off at just like, a million bucks or something, could they? (seems that is ample profit off a 10 grand expected loss)
3/6/2014 5:39 PM (edited)