Warren Buffett Offers $1 Billion to Anyone with the Perfect March Madness Bracket. Mr. Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway along with Quicken Loans’ is offering 1 billion dollars,to anyone who can successfully fill out the perfect bracket for this year’s NCAA Men’s basketball tournament. Yes. You read it right. 1 billion dollars. That's a 100 million.
March Madness involves 68 teams playing in a single-elimination tournament to determine the national champion of the men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 18, 2014, and will conclude with the championship game on April 7 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_NCAA_Men%27s_Division_I_Basketball_Tournament
And what does one need to do to earn a billion dollars. Surprisingly not much. The main draw of the tournament consists of 64 teams playing knockout matches. All you need to predict is the winners of the 63 games that will be played.
Intuitively one would think that it couldn't be that much of a big deal. Especially if you are able to use some amount of game knowledge and expertise and permutations and combinations of the various possibilities.
Your intuition would be incorrect. The no. of possible results is around 9.2 quintillion.
The math in this case is simple. The no. of possibilities is 2 raised to the number of games, which would be 2 raised to 63. And that is around 9.2 quintillion. And in case you are wondering, a quintillion has 18 zeros. To put that number in perspective, a million has just 6 and a billion only 9 zeros.
For the interested, the exact number of combinations is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
And so your odds of winning are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. But since there are no entry fees, more than 10 million have entered for their chance to win a billion dollars. And possibly the only reasons for this relatively small number of entries is that the entries were capped at 10 million and only 1 entry per household was permitted.
And just in case you're wondering, No, I did not participate. I bought the Powerball Lottery. The likelihood of winning the jackpot prize is just 1 in 175,223,510.
175 million versus 9.2 quintillion. I'm more than 52 billion times more likely to win the Powerball than get the March Madness billion. Who wouldn't want odds improved by over a billion times ?
March Madness involves 68 teams playing in a single-elimination tournament to determine the national champion of the men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 18, 2014, and will conclude with the championship game on April 7 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_NCAA_Men%27s_Division_I_Basketball_Tournament
And what does one need to do to earn a billion dollars. Surprisingly not much. The main draw of the tournament consists of 64 teams playing knockout matches. All you need to predict is the winners of the 63 games that will be played.
Intuitively one would think that it couldn't be that much of a big deal. Especially if you are able to use some amount of game knowledge and expertise and permutations and combinations of the various possibilities.
Your intuition would be incorrect. The no. of possible results is around 9.2 quintillion.
The math in this case is simple. The no. of possibilities is 2 raised to the number of games, which would be 2 raised to 63. And that is around 9.2 quintillion. And in case you are wondering, a quintillion has 18 zeros. To put that number in perspective, a million has just 6 and a billion only 9 zeros.
For the interested, the exact number of combinations is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808.
And so your odds of winning are 1 in 9.2 quintillion. But since there are no entry fees, more than 10 million have entered for their chance to win a billion dollars. And possibly the only reasons for this relatively small number of entries is that the entries were capped at 10 million and only 1 entry per household was permitted.
And just in case you're wondering, No, I did not participate. I bought the Powerball Lottery. The likelihood of winning the jackpot prize is just 1 in 175,223,510.
175 million versus 9.2 quintillion. I'm more than 52 billion times more likely to win the Powerball than get the March Madness billion. Who wouldn't want odds improved by over a billion times ?
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