Computer System Makes Best Sports Bets

schliz writes to tell us that a new computer system using the "Logistic Regression Markov Chain" (LRMC) has proven to be the most efficient system at predicting sporting event outcomes. The system was tested on the 2008 US NCAA basketball season and picked all four of the finalists. "Similar to other rankings systems, LRMC uses the quality of each NCAA team's results and the strength of each team's schedule to rank teams. The method has been designed to use only basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage and the margin of victory."

My NCAA predictor code had the same result!

[doxology]

Here's the code I used

List pickFinalFour(Tournament tourney){
      List finalFour = new ArrayList();
      for (Division d : tourney){
            Team bestTeam = null;
            int minSeed = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
            for (Team t : d){
                  if (t.getSeed()minSeed){
                        minSeed = t.getSeed();
                        minSeed = team;
                  }
            }
            finalFour.add(bestTeam);
      }
      return finalFour;
}

Re:only one question

[TheCreeep]

That's ok, becase I don't think that they created the algorithm with you in mind. You're just a negligible quantity.

Wait a minute!

[ydra2]

Are you telling me that somebody actually looked at win/loss records and margin of victory and strength of opponents to figure out which team might win? How can this be? Why did nobody ever figure out this simple algorithm before? [slaps forehead with hand] DOH!

Oh wait, sorry it was patented years ago, and multiple times with minute variations such as going back to strength of opponents opponents, and margin of victory of opponents against common opponents, and strength of opponents opponents opponents, and ....

But if you add in what they ate for breakfast, then you might have a new patentable algorithm.

Re:My NCAA predictor code had the same result!

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Here's mine:

pick :: Ord a => [[a]] -> [a]
pick = map minimum

Re:Best bet is not to bet...

[Fizzl]

One of our research assistants started doing something like this about ten years ago

Jesus H Christ it must suck to be a scientist. Imagine working 10 years at one place and still be a mere "assistant".

Re:Now Hear This!

[maxwell demon]

"We want this machine off, and we want it off now!"

But I can predict which team the machine will predict to win: Team #42