From NOTICE News Daily for March 14, 2023
What are your chances of having a totally correct March Madness bracket? “When it comes to filling out a bracket, there are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 or 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes. In other words… a lot of chances to pick an incorrect outcome.”
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TRANSCRIPT
JONATHAN: March Madness starts tonight and we have just one question for you – have you filled out your bracket?
Every year, millions of people fill out a bracket to try to predict the outcome of each game – and the tournament – to win some cash.
Last year, 45 million Americans filled out brackets and an estimated 3.1 billion dollars was handed out in contests across the country.
If you’ve ever filled a bracket out, the thought of a perfectly correct ballot may have crossed your mind, but the odds of getting every game correct is pretty small.
If you do your research and take each team’s track record into account, those odds are 1 in 120 billion.
But if you do it at random, those odds go up to over 9 quintillion which is a number our brains absolutely cannot compute.
Sound: “In each game there are two possible outcomes and in each game there is 2x2x2x2 so you actually have 2 to the 63”
Although you have a one in two chance of correctly guessing the outcome of each game, those odds go up to 2 to the 63rd power since there are 63 games.
For reference, a group of researchers estimate there are 7.5 quintillion grains of sand on the planet.
As of now, the University of Houston Cougars are the odds on favorite to win the tournament with Alabama and Kansas close behind.
The first game tips off tonight at 6:40pm Eastern Standard Time.
