Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madness bracket

Re:Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madnes... by sytelus on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @03:21AM (#7101449)

This seems to be ripe for attack through ML models. It should be easy enough to create models and test it out on previous years to see its accuracy. May be some of us can do ensembles of models with bunch of best predictions (Netflix style!). Any idea where to get data sets for previous games?

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Re:Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madnes... by ghshephard on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @03:26AM (#7101477)

If you had any success doing that on a full on march madness bracket, you could probably make a lot more than a Billion dollars (over time, don't be greedy) - betting on the sports betting scene, which is a (great) deal larger than $1B/year.

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Re:Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madnes... by Houshalter on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @03:53AM (#7101552)

The odds of winning are 1 in 4,294,967,296 at random guessing. If your system can do 100 times better, that reduces it to 1 in 42,949,672. Or an expected utility of a measly 23 dollars, so don't waste too much time on it.

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Re:Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madnes... by adestefan on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @07:34AM (#7102198)

Says every naive sports gambler.

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Re:Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madnes... by rfergie on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @07:39AM (#7102220)

"it should be easy" is always the killer

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Re:Warren Buffett offers $1 billion for perfect March Madnes... by dreeves on Wednesday January 22, 2014 @03:25AM (#7101476)

I'd bet that the strategy of always picking the favorites is about the best you can do.

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