It is organized a little differently than the usual bracket picking, which made it more fun to
prepare an entry. You are given a budget of 100 units, and you must pick a subset of teams
as many as you want subject to the budget constraint: Teams seeded 1 cost 25, 2 cost 19, ...
16 seeds cost 1. I simulated 10,000 brackets, and recorded the survival probabilities as in
the earlier survival plot on this blog, and then computed the expected number of wins for
each team, normalized by their cost, ordered the teams and produced the following list of
teams. The winner is the entry whose teams accumulate the largest number of wins.
EWins Seeds Cost Bang CumCost CumEWins
Gonzaga 1.1619 11 4 0.2904750 4 1.1619
Pittsburgh 0.9041 10 4 0.2260250 8 2.0660
Cincinnati 1.0757 9 5 0.2151400 13 3.1417
Iowa 1.6385 7 8 0.2048125 21 4.7802
Syracuse 0.8112 10 4 0.2028000 25 5.5914
VA Commonwealth 0.7855 10 4 0.1963750 29 6.3769
West Virginia 2.4625 3 13 0.1894231 42 8.8394
Duke 2.2013 4 12 0.1834417 54 11.0407
Purdue 1.9888 5 11 0.1808000 65 13.0295
Connecticut 0.9040 9 5 0.1808000 70 13.9335
Butler 0.8602 9 5 0.1720400 75 14.7937
Indiana 1.8908 5 11 0.1718909 86 16.6845
Texas A&M 1.8507 3 13 0.1423615 99 18.5352
Actually, several teams: MSU, Oklahoma, USC, and Kentucky came after IU but before Texas
A&M but I couldn't afford them, so I went with the Aggies, which gave me a list of 13 teams.
Until yesterday this list served me reasonably well, I had 14 wins after the round of 32, but now
barring a miracle there is no way my remaining teams: Gonzaga, Syracuse, and Indiana
are going to get me anywhere near my anticipated 18.5 wins. Last year Xiaofeng Shao
won with 6 teams and 21 wins, I think that he is well on the way again this year.
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