Math Corner - March 14, 2024 Edition
Date
3-14-2024
Question
NCAA’s basketball championships are knows as “March Madness” (where NSU’s men’s basketball team is the defending NCAA Division II national champions.) In 2014, there was a contest where a billion dollars was offered as a prize for predicting the results of all 63 division one men’s basketball games as a “perfect bracket” where predictions on the winners of all 63 games had to be made before the start of the first game. A hotly debated topic at the time was “What is the probability of predicting a perfect bracket?” Find an upper bound on this probability which is equivalent to probability of correctly predicting the outcomes (head or tails) on 63 consecutive fair coin flips.
COinS
Answer
1 in 9.2 Quintillion