Beat the Machine contest

Starting next week I’m going to be running 10,000 sims for each of the conference tournaments. As the brackets are decided I’ll be running simulations for the six conferences that this blog covers that have tournaments (oh Ivy League). This is fun because it requires me to program a whole bunch of options into my tournament simulator. You’ve got everything from straight neutral site events (MAAC), to all on home court (NEC), to single host (Great West), to a mix of both (America East). Plus there need to be slight home adjustments for the CAA schools playing their tournament in Richmond, VA. That’s a lot of variables and it’ll certainly make things interesting, but I know what’s up.

But doing all this work with no reward isn’t any fun. Thus I’d like to propose a contest. Let’s play “Beat the Machine”. Here are the rules:

• For each simulated conference tournament the computer will get a decimal of the winner. For instance, if Iona wins 67% of the simulated MAAC tournaments and wins the real life tournament the computer gets 0.67 points.
• I’ll also simulate a team’s chances of getting to the final. The computer will get the decimal value for those teams as well. Iona was 89% to make the final the computer adds 0.89 points. Manhattan was a 30% chance. The computer gets 0.30.
• Humans either get 1 point (predicting the winner / finalists) or 0 points (miss). Thus you can earn up to 3 points per conference.

Thus the maximum number of points for either side would be 18. My guess is that a number of humans will be able to guess the finalists, but it should still make things exciting for the short term. What do you think? Too easy? Want to play? Contact me via the form or leave a comment on this post. You want prizes? Let’s see how many people sign up and then maybe I’ll think of something fun.