Machines are coming for your March Madness office pool

March Madness--the NCAA college basketball championship playoffs--is among the most popular sporting events in the US, thanks in part to the wide-ranging contest that has evolved around predicting which teams will progress through the tournament. This year, almost $10.4 million is on the line in office pools or more organized competitions, and more than 40 million Americans will fill out their own versions of the playoff brackets to take part, according to the American Gaming Association. The chances of predicting a perfect bracket, which no one has ever done, are at least 1 in 128 billion and could be as remote as 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Now machine learning is taking a shot. Kaggle, the online platform for predictive modeling and analytics competitions that was acquired by Google parent company Alphabet last year, is hosting a competition for both the NCAA men's and women's tournaments. Kaggle provides a data set with information like tournament seeds going back to the 1984-85 season; final scores of all regular season, conference tournament, and NCAA tournament games since 1984-85; and every Division I men's and women's basketball play-by-play moment since 2009.