The Key to the Perfect March Madness Bracket: Evolution

Predicting the winners and losers of March Madness is such a daunting challenge that it attracts math nerds like Starfleet voyagers lining up at Comic-Con. Statisticians, economists, Silicon Valley coders, the PhD quants at hedge funds and gambling syndicates: They've all tried to "solve" the outcome of the annual college basketball tournament's 63 matchups. "Every kid who takes a mathematical modeling class and who's a college basketball fan, the first thing they want to do is predict the NCAA tournament," says Ken Pomeroy, a former meteorologist who has become arguably the foremost college basketball numbers guru. His famous KenPom ratings measure the strength of all 351 NCAA Division 1 basketball teams using an old-school regression technique known as "least squares," which analyzes statistical variances in teams' past performances and helps predict the winners in two-team matchups. But to generate entire brackets is to tangle not just with the randomness of the game itself, but with the randomness of your betting pool--the lucky guesses made by all the people you're competing against to predict the greatest number of winners.