Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Archive for March 11th, 2012

 

For March Madness, the Mathematics Behind Bracketology

March 11th, 2012 / in Research News, resources / by Erwin Gianchandani

Just in time for the kickoff of March Madness later today, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson describes the mathematics behind bracketology — and BracketOdds, a website his research team developed that uses data from 27 past tournaments “to identify a distribution that models the probability of certain seed combinations playing each round of the tournament.” From the interview, posted on UIUC’s website: The tournament is exciting for its upsets and seeming unpredictability. Yet your research has found distinct patterns. How can that help people trying to make sense of it all?   Each game in the tournament can be viewed as a random experiment, with a different […]